


Wind Shear

by adrenaline-whump (addie_wordsmith)



Series: Caden Hale [2]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Brief suicidal ideation, Captivity, Gen, Non-Graphic Violence, PTSD, Reference to mildly dubious consent, Various OCs - Freeform, Whump, Whump with plot, and some comfort to balance, lots of swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-06-28
Packaged: 2021-03-03 19:48:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 52,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24951064
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/addie_wordsmith/pseuds/adrenaline-whump
Summary: Cade wants to be fine, and for life to get back to normal, but it's not that easy. The bruises from his encounter with Owen Casey faded months ago, but Cade's not the same person he was. He's tried everything he can think of to get his head on straight. Everything, that is, except one last possibility he's been avoiding. If he can track down Owen one more time, and put him away for good, maybe Cade can finally let himself relax.The only problem is, it starts to look like he's not the only one after his target. And the others may be looking at a more permanent solution than jail...for Owen, and anyone else who gets too close.
Series: Caden Hale [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1807390
Comments: 21
Kudos: 17





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I thought In the Wind was a complete story. And then my dearest writing buddy Whumpadoodle asked me what happened next. I said, "But, you see, [plot problem]." And she said, "How about [solution]?" And I said, "...that's BRILLIANT."
> 
> Now, 52,000 words later, this is the result. Be warned, it's sort of slow-burn whump...there's a lot of investigation in the early chapters, but I can assure you that things WILL go off the rails.
> 
> I think you could read this one without having read In the Wind, though you might miss a couple of jokes that reference the earlier story.
> 
> Many hugs and thanks to Whumpadoodle for what was more like an alpha read, and to captivity-whump for the beta read. I appreciate all the great feedback!
> 
> CWs/TWs - Please see the end notes for specific (mildly spoilery) notes.

I was hoping we wouldn’t find our skip. Stupid thought, and I knew it. If we didn’t find her, we wouldn’t get paid, and we’d have gotten up before sunrise for nothing.

Amy’s truck bumped over the railroad tracks, and I held my coffee over my knees, letting my arm absorb the shocks. She hunched over the steering wheel and muttered four-letter words as she followed Hank by watching the Tahoe’s tail lights. All we could see of the road ahead was ghostly yellow lines, and the buildings were hulking, squared-off shapes that loomed out of the gray and then fell behind us.

We were after a skip we’d picked up before, a crazy-haired girl named Maggie, and Maggie was a little unpredictable. Sometimes she was docile, almost catatonic. Other times, she went into angry-cat mode, hissy and spitty and scratchy. She was homeless more often than not, and Hank had heard she’d been panhandling around the boarded-up gas station at Dyer and 13th. He thought we might find her inside, sleeping something off, if we got there at the asscrack of dawn. Amy and I were along in case there were more campers than just Maggie.

We’d done a briefing before we headed out, covering where we were going and what we expected to find. I knew Hank wouldn’t be shy about changing plans, or even waving off, if he didn’t like the way the situation felt. I trusted his instincts. I missed being able to trust my own.

As we pulled in and parked, the fog swirled and thinned out for a moment, and the wispy morning sunlight glinted off glass shards on the asphalt. I slammed the last of my coffee, hoping the caffeine would do its magic. I was used to operating tired by now, but it had been at least four days since I’d gotten decent sleep, and I didn’t want to be the slowest to react if things went pear-shaped.

Amy shook her head to make sure her blonde bun would stay secure, and Hank tapped his gear in the same pattern as always, even though he’d already checked it. We all had our ways of dealing with pickup adrenaline. It wasn’t the coffee’s fault my heart rate was climbing.

It’s risky being first in the door, so Hank took point. Amy fell in after him, and I followed her. Tailguard is my usual slot; I back up the others plus I keep an eye out behind us, so we don’t have a blind spot.

As we walked up to the building, Hank silently pointed out the jagged metal along the edge of the door, a warning not to catch ourselves on it. No telling how many locks had been installed and pried out over the last few months. The most recent lock was resting on the pavement by a rusty “No Trespassing” sign. Hank eased the door open, one hand on his holster, and stepped inside.

Scraps of light snuck in past the warped edges of the plywood, glinting off the fractured glass. Where shelves had been, rust stained the floor, and old footprints lay over each other in the dust. The silence made my head feel congested, like something was pressing in on my ears. No air conditioner whir, no buzz of fluorescent lights. Hank’s footsteps ticked across the torn linoleum as he circled the sagging counter.

No one was sleeping behind the counter, or in the stained, fixtureless restrooms. The storage area was home to spiders and rats, that was all.

The door that led into the old repair bay was cracked open. Hank pushed through it slowly, scanning the space as more of it came into view. I kept an eye on the set of his shoulders, and then Amy’s, as she followed him in. One last scan behind us, and I stepped through the door.

Between one second and the next, I lost track of where I was.

_Rust and diesel, dust and mildew; no one’s been in here for ages. Dim light on angled metal; the slam of a door echoing up into darkness; Owen’s arm tightens around my throat, his voice is in my ear, I can’t reach him get off get away no_

“Cade? Cade, look at me. Hank!”

_Let go of me let go stop it stop it make it stop I can’t_

“I think he’s – listen to me, babe, you’re not there. We’re in Memphis. You’re OK. I’m here with you. Hank’s here.”

“Get him outside?”

“Don’t grab on to him. Stand up for me, babe. Come on, we’re standing up now, you and me. There you go, good job. Come this way.” A light touch on my shoulder guided me toward the door. 

_The good shoulder, not the one I landed on when I hit the ground, hurting more and more as the hours pass, he hauls me up by my arms, soundless searing whiteout_

“One foot in front of the other, just like that.” Amy folded my hands around a plastic bottle, cold and slick with condensation. Alex had given me water in North Carolina, afterwards. That was night, though, three in the morning. This was a different parking lot, a different time of day. The sun shone through the plastic, glittering, trembling. My hands were shaking. All of me was shaking. It made more sparkles on the surface of the water. I looked at Amy and tried to say, “I’m sorry,” but my lungs still didn’t feel like they belonged to me. She got the gist of it, or she was a good lip reader.

“No need to be sorry, babe,” she said. “You back with me now?”

A gust of wind sent cold air down my collar, and I shivered again.

She had a quick, quiet conference with Hank, and they bundled me into the Tahoe.

The more I came back to myself, the worse I felt. Slow reflexes were one thing, but having a meltdown in the middle of an operation was a whole different level of failure.

~~~

Back at the office, Hank parked me in a chair by his desk and went back down the hall to our little closet kitchen. Conversation floated back toward me, low and serious, like the voice you use in hospitals. Nothing they were saying would make me feel any better, so I blocked it out and let my eyes trace the patterns of gouges and water marks on the desk. It was a battered old soldier even before he got it, with three square corners and one rounded one. I don’t know how the one got broken off, but someone had filled in the jagged bit with epoxy and sanded the whole thing down.

The front door opened and closed. Hank came back with two mugs and handed one to me before he settled into his chair. I pressed my fingers into it, like that would help them soak in more of the heat. The coffee scent drifted around the room, coiling around the silence. I mentally rehearsed the right phrases. _Yes, sir, I understand. You have to consider everyone’s safety._

“Do you want to talk about today?” he asked.

Did I want to? Not at all. I wanted to bury today and never think about it again. Because that tactic was going so well for me. Ha.

No one wants a special-needs case on their team. You have to trust each other; you have to believe every person on the crew will back you up when you need them. That’s why I kept it all to myself, as much as I could. All the nightmares, all the random dizzy spells: none of it mattered unless it affected my work, and I made sure it didn’t. Mostly. Until today.

When I didn’t say anything, he patiently prompted, “That looked like a full-blown flashback. Is that what happened?”

“I guess.”

“Haven’t had one before now?”

“No.”

He seemed to be waiting for me to say something else, but I didn’t know what I could say. I’d read about flashbacks in the handouts the shrink gave me, but I’d never had one, not up to now. I didn’t want to think about what that meant. I kept waiting to get better, and it kept not happening.

Hank set his mug down inside one of the round water stains. “Aside from today…talk to me about the last six months.”

Talk about the last six months. Open the closet where I’ve been cramming all the garbage. Could I make myself, or would the words strangle each other inside my skull?

Maybe I could narrow it down. Limit the damage. “What do you want to know?”

“Is there more going on that you want to tell me about?”

“Nothing like today.”

I got the Army staredown, the square-jawed laser that takes an inch off your height when it hits you. My heart went _ka-thunk_ and landed somewhere in the neighborhood of my tailbone.

“Cade.”

“Sir.”

“Given the number of interviews I’ve done over the years, do you think I’m not going to recognize an evasion?”

“No, sir.”

“Do you want to work for me?”

There it was. I locked everything down as tight as I could. “Are you kicking me out?”

He held my eyes for a moment. “Not yet.”

Great. What a relief. Like someone had wired my house with C-4, and told me they weren’t going to blow it up. _Not yet._

He picked up a pen, turned it over, and put it down again, lining it up parallel to the edge of his keyboard. “It’s my job to make sure my team stays safe. I failed at that in North Carolina, and I’m sorry.” 

I didn’t try to argue that again. It wouldn’t have happened if I’d been more alert when I walked into the cabin. He said he shouldn’t have sent me back there alone.

“I don’t want to punish you for something that isn’t your fault, but I have the same responsibility now that I had then.”

It would hurt less to say it than hear it. “If I’m a danger to everybody—”

“Fuck ‘everybody,’ Cade, I’m worried about _you.”_

My eyes felt hot.

“I can’t see what’s in your head. I have to trust that you’ll tell me the truth. And you haven’t.”

I’d never try to straight up lie to Hank, not in a million years. I would have said that, but I couldn’t get the words to line up right.

“I believe you when you say today was a first. That’s not the issue. But over the last six months, I’ve watched you lose weight; I’ve watched you come to work exhausted, and make up the difference with caffeine; I’ve watched you shy away like a startled horse from nothing I could see. And every time I ask you how you’re doing, you say ‘fine.’ Can you look me in the eye and tell me that was an honest answer?”

That wasn’t lying, not really. All I meant was I didn’t need them to worry about me.

“I’d hate to lose you. You’re an asset to this team. But if you can’t be honest with me, if you don’t trust me to do the right thing for you – for all of us – you don’t need to be here.”

“Yes, sir.”

~~~

When I got back out to my car, I sat down, closed the door, and leaned my head back on the headrest for a few minutes.

Hank should have fired me. Might still.

I had my orders. Go home and think, he’d said. Not about how I’d screwed up; that was the past. Think about right now, and the future. Whether or not I wanted to stay on his crew. If I did, then think about how to make that work: what I could do for myself, and what I’d need help with.

In other words: _unfuck your shit, Cade._

Lord. If I knew how, I would have already done it.

I started the car and headed out, through the old downtown and the shiny new downtown, past the converted lofts, and into the weedy, skunky part of town that no one could figure out how to improve, so they left it to crumble in on itself, but it doggedly hung on and refused to crumble.

The duplex where I parked didn’t feel like home yet, but it was a place to keep my stuff. I’d only been there for a couple of months. My next-door neighbor Luis was outside with gardening gloves and clippers, trimming the rose bush that straggled up the side of the house. He waved at me as I heaved myself and my gear out of the car.

 _“Hola, vecino!”_ he caroled. “How are your pants?”

Even after the morning I’d had, I almost laughed. My life, some days.

“They’re fine, Luis. Thanks.”

He dropped his gardening tools and came over to turn me around with impersonal expertise. “ _Tsk,_ you’ve been sitting in dirt. Wash that in cold water. Fit still good?”

“Yeah, still good.” Luis was a tailor at a dry cleaner’s in town. I was lucky I met him when I did, even if the circumstances were a little awkward. I paid him to take in all my work pants so I wouldn’t have to completely restock my closet.

I might not have met him at all – in our part of town, people don’t go out of their way to get chatty with the neighbors – except that I woke up screaming one night and scared the crap out of him and Charles. They thought someone was being murdered next door, and they called the cops. We got everything sorted out; they were embarrassed and I was embarrassed, and we ended up talking on the front porch after the cops had left. I told them a short and sanitized version of my story, and apologized again for waking them up. They said no worries, they were just glad I was OK.

Since Luis already knew the story, I hadn’t felt too self-conscious about asking him for one other alteration, as long as he was adjusting waistbands. It only took him another minute to add a tiny pocket inside at the back, just big enough to hold a half-size handcuff key. And when I’d mentioned it to Amy, she thought it was a great idea, and so did Donnie and the rest of the crew. Luis had all the side business he could handle for a while there.

Most cops would catch a holdout key on a pat-down, but that wasn’t the point. There’s a right way and a bunch of wrong ways to cuff someone, and a cop’s going to do it the right way, so they could straight up put a key in your hand, and you’d never be able to reach the keyhole. We were just using it as insurance against another Owen situation, unlikely as that was.

  


Inside, I dumped my gear on the chair by the door and dumped myself on the sofa. I felt like hammered shit, exhausted and jittery at the same time, but that was nothing new. I’d gotten about five hours of sleep the night before. Falling asleep wasn’t the problem, for once, but I’d thrashed hard enough to wake myself up in the middle of the night, thanks to the dream I was having where something was dragging me toward a thousand-foot cliff.

I’d thought the sleeping problems would eventually fade away like the bruises, and I’d get back to normal. “Eventually” is a fuzzy time horizon, though, and it never seemed to get any closer. A little voice whispered in the back of my head that maybe I was damaged past the point of fixing. The only thing that kept me going was the thought of getting better, and if that was never going to happen, I should just quit before I got someone hurt.

I didn’t want to leave. I’d worked with Hank’s crew for ten years. When I joined up, it had been just him, Darren, Richard and me. Darren got hurt and he left, so Hank recruited Donnie. Alex and Amy came in a couple of years after that. Since then, we’d just been picking up skips, working together, and getting better at it over the years. If I quit...I didn’t know what else I’d do. I’d never be part of a crew like this again.

But if someone got hurt because of me, it would all be over anyway. Maybe it was over already, and I just hadn’t admitted it to myself.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. It was asking to be spiked into the corner, but I looked at it anyway. 

It was a text from Donnie: _Hey, u ok?_

The easy answer was yes, but Hank had just called me out for that. And chances were good Donnie was texting now because he’d gotten a heads-up from Amy.

 _Depends what you mean by ok,_ I sent back.

_Are you currently planning to suck-start a shotgun?_

Ouch. He’d heard about this morning, all right.

I’d never said anything to him about considering the shotgun option, but Donnie reads people the way you or I would read a weather report. I’ve seen him swat a beer bottle off a table a half-second before a skip tried to grab it. I was probably even less of a challenge, since he’s known me for so long.

 _Not right this second,_ I typed.

_U at home?_

_Yes_

_BRT_

I pried myself off the sofa. No point in arguing; I’d learned that six months ago. I hadn’t left my apartment for a week after I got back from North Carolina, because I looked like shit and I didn’t feel like being stared at. Next thing I knew, Donnie was knocking on my door to check on me, and Amy was showing up with groceries. (She insisted on putting everything away for me too, since she had two good arms. “Just point to where you want it,” she ordered, “and use the polite finger.”)

I threw my gear in the closet and dragged the chair over to the kitchen table, where it was supposed to live. Hank’s not the only one who picks up on details – it goes with the territory, in our line of work – and I didn’t want to explain to Donnie that I slept better, sometimes, with a chair under the doorknob.

I hadn’t been able to forget Owen telling me he knew where I lived.

That was half the reason I’d moved into this crappy duplex. There was no reason for him to come looking for me, and a thousand reasons not to, but asleep-me didn’t see it that way. Let me tell you, it _really_ screws with your head to dream that you wake up and someone’s in your apartment. I’d woken up one night with my heart hammering, and I laid there for a long time, perfectly still, listening for footsteps in the dark.

The chair helped. Moving to a new place helped. Some. He was still out there somewhere.

~~~

Donnie showed up with doughnuts from Gibson’s. Bastard.

“I’m going to regret this,” I predicted, but I took one anyway.

“You’ve got room, skinny-ass.”

“I’m not any skinnier than Hank.”

“He’s tall, he can pull it off.”

“Everyone’s tall to you, smurf. If this makes me sick, I’m throwing up on you.”

“Dude, your kink is not OK.”

I threw a half-hearted punch at him, and he blocked it easily, grinning.

Eventually he worked his way around to asking me about that morning. I gave him the recap, as best I could. I remembered most of it, but a few parts were fuzzy.

“What triggered you, do you know?”

“It was when I stepped into the repair bay.” I was half-afraid just thinking about it would send me into another tailspin. “I think it was the way it smelled.”

“Huh. Like wherever he took you?”

I nodded. No one had ever figured out where Owen and I had spent the hours between the cabin and the parking lot. He’d made sure I didn’t get a good look at the place, so all I could tell anyone was that it seemed industrial. Our best guess was that he’d bribed someone for access to a mothballed factory. Donnie – who was the only one willing to try to make me laugh about any of it – had speculated about how the criminal element would rent a hideout, and what the going rate might be. We’d decided it was probably worth about one slightly used Glock, since mine had never turned up again.

“At least that’s easy to work around,” he offered. “Stay out of abandoned buildings.”

“It still sucks. I don’t want y’all to have to work around me.”

“You could try to desensitize yourself to it, I guess.”

“Maybe,” I said. “Or I could go do something else.”

“You mean quit?” He looked shocked. “Dude. No.”

“It would be the simplest solution.”

“Simplest doesn’t mean it’s the _right_ solution.”

I tried to explain that it might be better for everyone, but he wouldn’t listen. And like I said, I had zero ideas for a new career. Law enforcement is always hiring, but that wouldn’t be much different than working for Hank. And besides, I’d decided a long time ago that I didn’t want to be a cop.

“I could be a security guard,” I said. “Then it wouldn’t matter if I went crazy in the middle of a shift.”

“You are _not_ going to be a fucking mall cop. I will physically drag you back and dump you in front of Hank’s desk if you try that.”

I wasn’t sure if he was joking or not. “Well, if I’m going to stay, I have to fix my shit. Somehow.”

He wanted to know if I was seeing a shrink, which I was. Amy had given me a name, a guy who had helped a couple of her old Army buddies. I’d resisted going for the longest time because I didn’t want to pay someone to listen to me whine about my feelings. It wasn’t really like that, though. We talked about how brains work, the way they run on chemicals and all that, and he gave me a page of take-home exercises to work on.

“Do they help?” Donnie asked.

“Well…I’m not sure where that paper ended up,” I said lamely.

“So find it. Or ask for another copy.”

“It was just _thinking_. Like, think about feeling better. Seriously.”

He didn’t change expression. “Did you do the physical therapy exercises for your shoulder?”

“That was different.”

“How? Physical therapy is practicing the right motions. Why wouldn’t mental therapy be practicing the right thoughts?”

When he put it that way… “I don’t know. Maybe. I’ll see if I can find it.”

He let that drop, and we talked about other stuff until he had to go pick up a friend who was flying into town. They were planning to go out for drinks that night; “they” being the two of them, plus Alex and Amy and some other folks. He asked if I wanted to meet them there, but I said no thanks.

My answer was almost automatic. I used to go out with Donnie and Alex more, but their usual spot is Saucy’s Pub, a couple blocks over from the office. If we could get a booth close to the door, and I put my back to the wall, it wasn’t too bad. But it was a roll of the dice; we might just as easily end up in the middle of the noisy crowd, and at the end of the night, I’d go home exhausted and irritated. So I just quit going. It was hard to explain, so I didn’t try, but I think Donnie guessed. He kept inviting me, though.

After he left, I excavated the pile of papers on the kitchen table and found the page with the shrink’s exercises. They still sounded like a kid’s game of Let’s Pretend. Visualize myself feeling calm. Visualize the nightmares turning into better dreams.

Might as well visualize Hank telling me the feds had found Owen Casey and locked him up; maybe that would happen too. That would do more for my mental state than any cheesy affirmations.


	2. Chapter 2

On Wednesday, I flailed awake in a cold sweat at 4:00 am. There were days when I really wished Hank hadn’t done what he did in North Carolina, and those days usually started with me waking up convinced that Hank was dead and it was my fault. I’d never imagined how hard it could be to forgive someone for saving your life.

I understood, even if I didn’t agree. He saw it as his responsibility to keep his crew safe, so if the only way to get me out of a bad situation was to put himself in one, then that’s what had to be done. Obviously, he’d made the right call, since we were both alive to talk about it, but sometimes I thought what had really fucked me up wasn’t the nine hours with Owen; it was the 98 stomach-churning minutes afterwards, sitting in the dark parking lot with Donnie and Alex, waiting – hoping – to hear from Hank.

I was scheduled to meet with him Wednesday morning, to tell him where my head was at; that’s probably why it was that particular nightmare again. Since I wasn’t going to go back to sleep, I went for a run, and then did some of the visualization junk. I pictured myself talking to Hank, not choking up, not feeling dizzy, just saying what needed to be said.

A few hours later, sitting in front of the battered desk again, with my hands around the same chipped mug, I did my best to stick to that picture. I told him about the problems I had sleeping, and the weird things that set me off these days. The way I’d feel out of breath for no real reason. The panic attack I had while I was driving one time. I told him none of it had happened when I was working – which was mostly true, nothing serious had happened – but I couldn’t guarantee it wouldn’t.

“In your shoes, I wouldn’t trust me,” I said. “If I can’t count on myself, I can’t expect you to count on me, and – it’s been six months, and it hasn’t gotten better lately.”

Hank nodded, accepting my assessment. “What do you want to do?”

My stomach did flip-flops. I plunged ahead anyway.

“I want to find Owen.”

Hank’s not the type to jump when someone surprises him. He goes really still. He looked at me across the desk without saying anything.

“I don’t have the right to ask you,” I said. “You saved my ass, and I don’t think I’d be here today if you hadn’t. It’s just…I feel like half the problem is that I keep _looking_ for him. People walking past, people in cars…the other day I was at the grocery store, and there was a bagger with a sleeve tattoo; I saw it out of the corner of my eye and just about jumped out of my skin. I fucking _moved_ because of that crack he made about knowing where I live, and even after that, a part of me still wonders how the hell he tracked us to that cabin.

“If he was back in jail, I think it would make a big difference. I don’t know if this is an option, but – could we do the background stuff? Track him down, call up the cops wherever he is, and tell them where they can pick up a wanted felon? That would be the safest way.” Safest for us and for Owen. I wasn’t sure how I’d react if I encountered him face-to-face. Especially if I had a clear shot. 

“You know that contract’s expired,” Hank said, and I nodded. That wasn’t necessarily bad; we could give him up to the cops and not be leaving money on the table. 

Hank studied his desk for a minute and then looked back up at me. “I’m not saying yes, but I’m not saying no. Give me a little bit to think about it.”

~~~

The next day, I tried to occupy myself with errands for a while, but somehow I ended up at the office anyway. Richard was there, deep into whatever was on his monitors, and he gave me a distracted wave. “Hank said he wanted to talk to you if you came by.”

“Thanks.” I walked on down the short hallway. Hank waved me in, and I settled into the chair across from him. At this rate, I thought, he might as well put my name on it.

“This Owen case,” he said. “I understand why you want to get back into it. I haven’t followed up on it before now because it pings my radar a little.”

Hank’s radar tells him when a situation doesn’t feel right. Not a red alert, but a yellow one, maybe. “How so?”

“Couple of things,” he said. “The main thing – I didn’t tell you about this when it happened, because I didn’t think you’d want to be reminded of everything – but I got a call from Tara’s mother about a month ago.”

“No shit? Wanting to give you a lead on Owen?” To listen to Mrs. Michaels talk, you’d think her daughter was involved with a guy named That Scumbag.

“No, it was a weird situation. She was scared and didn’t know who to call, but she still had my card, and for whatever reason, she thought I might know what to do. 

“Some guys had showed up at her trailer, FBI special agents, or so they said. They flashed some paperwork and claimed it was a search warrant, about stolen goods Owen might have had when he stayed with her. She had no idea what a warrant should look like, and was too scared to tell them no, so they looked all through her property. They didn’t find what they wanted, as far as she could tell, and they didn’t leave a card or anything when they left.”

“That does sound hinky.” Mrs. Michaels didn’t strike me as easy to intimidate. She was short, like her daughter, but the way she’d planted her hands on her hips when we rolled up to pick up Tara...Donnie and Alex and I had hung back and let Hank deal with her.

“I told her they probably wouldn’t come back, but if they did, the safest thing would be to call the cops, or get her son to. Let a professional check their credentials. Then I called Cowley to see if he knew anything about it.” 

Special Agent Cowley was the FBI agent we’d given a report to back in September. Going through the whole story with him was its own special hell, but it had to be done. As soon as Owen had crossed the state line with Hank, it turned into a federal case. “And?”

“He wasn’t involved in that operation, whatever it was, and the Asheville field office wouldn’t have run an op like that without consulting him. And I was curious, so I looked into Owen’s history. Do you remember what he was charged with originally?”

“Theft, wasn’t it? So he could have had something with him back then.”

“Not really, not something that would lend itself to being hidden in a trailer. Owen’s a mechanic by trade; he and Tara both worked for a car dealership in Blakeley County. They were charged with running a scheme to rip off their employer’s parts inventory.”

“Huh. Were they selling the stuff out of state?”

“If they were, the feds don’t know about it. They want him for aggravated kidnapping, assault, and auto theft. Nothing about workplace theft. If that was his racket, I can’t think what kind of ‘stolen goods’ could have ended up at Tara’s mother’s place. Owen was on the run. He wouldn’t have packed up a bunch of catalytic converters for the trip.” 

“Yeah. So who the hell was taking the risk of impersonating feds?”

“Cowley was _very_ interested in that question. He said he’d get in touch with his counterparts in Asheville.” One side of his mouth twitched up. “I told him to warn them, if they went out to talk to Mrs. Michaels, be prepared for some local cops to show up too.”

“That’s definitely weird,” I said. “Maybe Owen stole something from the wrong person. But it’s not that big of a deal, is it? As long as we find him first.”

“It’s not who finds him first, the problem is we don’t know who else wants him. I’m not big on blind attacks. I want to know what I’m up against.”

“Right, but we’re not attacking anybody,” I said. “I’d be fine with just tipping off the cops to where he is. We don’t have to get involved.”

“Can you keep yourself from getting involved, if you track him down?”

“Sure.” That was my plan, anyway.

“Alright. Get with Richard and see what y’all can turn up. But keep me posted.”

~~~

Richard cleared space on his desk so I could pull up a chair. Not an easy task for him. He’s got a regular computer and a clunky old laptop set up side by side – I’ve never been clear on why – plus he likes having the rest of his stuff where he can see it. Hank gets twitchy when he looks in Richard’s office, so mostly he tries not to, though it’s the first one you pass in the hall.

After Richard made a pile of hard drives, Lego guys, and tiny spaceship figurines next to his police scanner, I grabbed a notebook and sat down with him to brainstorm. He’s been doing this for longer than I have, super smart guy, but this wasn’t a typical skip trace.

We always start with addresses, but all the usual databases pointed to Owen’s old trailer or Tara’s little apartment. We knew they weren’t there.

Sometimes we find people by tracing their vehicles, but our skips didn’t have a car that we knew of. The last one Owen had been driving was a rental we’d picked up for me, after Donnie had headed west in his truck with Tara. We’d reported it stolen, but we’d never needed to follow up on it, since it wasn’t ours. Richard called the rental company and sweet-talked an admin into emailing him the police report.

“How do you _do_ that?” I asked. He’s got a gift. One time he was following some leads, accidentally got our skip on the phone, and convinced the guy to meet us at a Walmart nearby. “I swear, you could talk KFC out of their secret recipe.”

He laughed. “It’s not that hard. You have to look at it backwards. Figure out what the other person wants, and try to help _them._ And some people, like that lady just now, all they want is to feel good about themselves for being helpful.”

The police report popped up in his email, and we dug into it.

The first unexpected wrinkle was that Owen had pulled a smart trick. The rental was a basic white Corolla. He’d found another one like it in a hotel parking lot off the interstate, and he’d swapped their license plates. That led to a bewildered family being questioned three days later at their hotel in the Outer Banks.

I’d have expected the trail to end there, because three days is enough time to get rid of a car, but it turned up again a couple of weeks later in Atlanta. The cops had raided a chop shop, and one of the items recovered was a Corolla’s left rear quarter panel with a VIN that hadn’t been etched off yet. That number matched our rental, so the cops notified the rental company, and the case was officially closed.

“Interesting,” I said. “Your average asshole isn’t going to think of the plate switch thing.”

“He also wouldn’t know how to get in touch with questionable mechanics in a strange city on short notice,” Richard noted. “I’ll bet Owen was into stealing cars as well as parts.”

“Wouldn’t surprise me,” I said. “So he took a right in South Carolina and headed into Georgia, but that doesn’t help much with where he is now.”

“Maybe he’s posted an inadvertent hint,” Richard said, and fired up Paranoia – that’s his tablet he accesses social media sites on. Donnie named it. Richard had tried to explain to the rest of us how Facebook and all of them track everything you’re doing. “They can build a profile of where you live, what you do all day, how many people you live with, where you shop…”

“So? I’m pretty boring.”

Richard had rolled his eyes and given up on us, but he still refused to log in to those kinds of sites on his regular computer.

We had Owen’s social media footprint on file from before, and Tara’s, but neither of them had posted any updates since last summer, and we couldn’t find any new accounts or profiles for them. Even if a person doesn’t use their real name, you can usually look at their friends and family connections to figure out what name they’re using, but that didn’t pan out either.

Richard shut down the tablet and scowled at his monitors, absently tracing a figure-8 with his mouse pointer. “Hey, Hank,” he called toward the hallway, “what’s your feeling about pretexting?”

“In what context?”

“Banks.”

Hank came to the door. “I’m going to say no to that. I know this is important to you, Cade, but it’s important to me that we don’t get ourselves in trouble. OK?”

It was fair. Pretexting is more or less lying to get private information, and it’s always a little dicey from a legal standpoint. 

“What else you got in your magic box?” I asked Richard. He tried some other databases and search tools, but things weren’t looking good. It was like Owen had dropped off the face of the earth after September. The normal next step is interviewing friends and family, but that can take a while.

He grumbled under his breath that he should have gone ahead with the pretexting and apologized later. I told him not to get himself in trouble on my account, and I headed home in case he wanted to work without someone looking over his shoulder.

~~~

A couple of days later, I dropped by the office to check in again and found Hank flipping through some paperwork that Richard had printed out.

“Case records for your Blakeley County lovebirds,” Richard told me. “Hank had to pull in a favor from the state guys to get a copy. County sheriff’s office is a bunch of dickheads.”

“I was thinking,” Hank told me, “if Owen and Tara were stealing inventory, they had to sell it to someone. If it was just a little deal they cooked up for extra cash, they probably would have put it up on eBay or Craigslist. But these affidavits don’t mention anything like that. On the whole, they’re very light on details.” He frowned. “The sheriff might have warrants in the pipeline with more specifics, if he’s after a larger theft ring. Sloppy way to do it, though.”

“Maybe that’s why they wouldn’t share the casefile,” Richard said. “They don’t want to tip their hand. Still, they didn’t have to be dicks about it.”

I said, “So if we could pin down more about that theft ring, and where they operate…”

“It might be a decent lead,” Hank said. “But let me check in with a few people first, in case there’s a larger investigation going. I don’t want to kick someone else’s tripwire.”

Hank called back his friend at the TBI, our state agency, and Cowley at the FBI. Neither of them knew of any reason to warn us off. There’s a huge black market for cars and car parts, and it’s tough to trace parts back to where they came from, so there are always investigations running. But no one was working any cases specific to, or centered on, Blakeley County.

Truth was, Blakeley was one of the better counties in the area, crime-wise. Most of the rural counties are absolutely drowning in meth and heroin these days. “Epidemic” doesn’t even start to cover it. And where you’ve got drugs, you’ve got crime and violence.

But Blakeley was pretty peaceful. When you come from Memphis, where somebody gets shot nearly every weekend, it’s weird to read about a place that’s had four murders in the last ten years.

“One drunk fight in a trailer park,” Richard read off, “one guy found shot in the middle of nowhere, one guy stabbed in a bar parking lot, and another fight…that’s the same trailer park as the first one. If I lived there, I’d move.”

“If you lived there, you might not have a choice,” Hank pointed out. 

“True. But it doesn’t sound like they have an organized crime problem.” Richard frowned. “So we don’t have any idea how Owen got himself caught?”

“The folks at the dealership ought to know,” I said. “Maybe they’d talk to me.”

Hank checked his phone. “My calendar’s clear tomorrow morning. You want to drive up there together and have a talk with the service manager?”

I swallowed my first reaction – _you don’t trust me to do a basic interview?_ He could have shut me down when I’d asked about looking for Owen, so I didn’t want to seem ungrateful. “Sure, if you don’t mind. You want to call ahead, or just show up?”

Hank elected to just show up, so the next morning we pointed the Tahoe east. I shaded my eyes from the sun and acted as navigator, though it turned out we didn’t need much navigation. It’s basically a straight shot from Memphis, if you don’t mind taking the scenic byway instead of the interstate.

The place was hard to miss. Blakeley County is far enough east that you get into some hillier country, and Reaves Dodge-RAM-Jeep-Chrysler was on a rise above the highway. A long line of pickups looked down on the road below, shoulder to shoulder like riot cops.

“Big place for a little county,” Hank noted. “They must get business from all over. Am I going to have to pull you away from the new Chargers?”

“Not the regular ones…but if they’ve got a Hellcat, I might drool on it a little.”

The dealership interior was shiny-smooth surfaces in all directions. A tall desk curved to one side of the main entrance, staffed by an older lady with a perfect puff of white hair. “Can I help you gentlemen?” she chirped.

“I hope so,” Hank said. “Would it be possible to speak to your service manager? I’d like to talk to him about a former employee, if he’s got time.”

“Oh, you want Russ,” she said, picking up a phone and tapping a button with a glossy fingernail. “Russ, honey, there are a couple of gentlemen out here who’d like a word with you. You’re welcome, sweetie.” She put down the phone and sparkled at us. “He’ll be right out. Can I get you anything? Water? Coffee?” 

When Hank politely declined, she looked around and lowered her voice conspiratorially, without losing a bit of the sparkle. “Is this about Owen?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Hank said placidly. “Not much of a surprise, is it?”

“Oh, heavens, no. I _do_ hope Tara’s alright, that poor girl. I don’t know _what_ he could have put into her head. She seemed so _sensible_.” She tut-tutted and shook her head.

Hank started to ask another question – I would have too, because that sounded like an interesting avenue to pursue – but a customer came in the front door, so we tactfully moved out of the way. A door opened at one end of the building.

My idea of a “service manager” is a guy in coveralls with grease under his fingernails. I almost didn’t pay attention to the man in the dark gray suit who came sauntering toward us.

Luis had told me once how to tell if someone gets their clothes tailored to fit. “That one, you want to make friends with,” he winked. “That one has money _and_ style.” This guy’s jacket was slim-cut and wrinkle-free. He shook our hands and introduced himself as Russell Reaves.

I was glad that Hank had come with me after all. I don’t have a problem with interviews, but Hank’s better with boss types. This guy had the practiced, focused attention you get from salesmen and politicians, and I was just as happy not to be the laser’s target.

He didn’t seem fazed when Hank introduced us as fugitive recovery specialists, just invited us to come with him to a conference room, and chatted away with Hank. He insisted that we call him Russ, since “Mr. Reaves” was his father, as far as he was concerned. Reaves Dodge was his parents’ dealership, so Russ had worked some in sales (“I don’t take no for an answer,” he told us with a wink) and then went to UTC for a business degree, where he learned enough to come back and take over running the service department.

He was happy to talk about himself, but when Hank redirected the conversation around to Owen, Russ got quiet and shook his head regretfully. “A real disappointment,” he said. “We brought Owen on board six or seven years ago. He didn’t have a lot of education, but one of our other mechanics recommended him. You don’t need a degree to work for me, just skills and smarts, and Owen had that. We’re a family business here, and I think of these guys as part of my extended family. When he and Tara ran off like that, it felt like a real betrayal.”

“I understand they were involved in some kind of inventory theft?” Hank asked. “How did you find out it was them?”

“I wish I could tell you,” he said apologetically. “It’s still an open case, you see? My lawyer said not to discuss the details with anyone. It doesn’t seem likely that it’ll ever come to trial, but I suppose if I’m paying for his advice, I ought to take it.”

Hank said he understood. “Do you know what were they doing with it? Who they were selling it to?”

“No idea, unfortunately,” said Russ. “Probably not nearby. The cities would be a better market for that kind of thing. You’re from Memphis, you said? Maybe there, or Nashville. Maybe another state, who knows?”

“Does he have close connections in any of those?” Hank asked, but Russ didn’t know. For all his talk about his people being “family” to him, he didn’t know much about Owen. No idea about his friends, or blood family, or hobbies, or anything. Hank asked if any of the other mechanics knew Owen better, but Russ didn’t think so, and he didn’t want to interrupt his guys while they were working.

“It’s always so busy around here, we’re always behind,” he explained. “We’re chronically short-handed, and losing Owen sure didn’t help. It’s hard to find qualified technicians who want to live way out here. If you’ll leave me your card, I’ll talk to the guys and see if anyone knows anything that might be helpful. I’ll definitely let you know, if they do.”

So, another strikeout. Usually we don’t have that much trouble finding people, unless they’re homeless. That was a possibility, of course. I wouldn’t have cared about Owen, but I couldn’t wish that on Tara. 

Hank and I headed back west on the scenic byway. He had a brooding look that I didn’t want to poke at, so we drove in silence for a while. It was his idea to come out here, I reminded myself. I could have done it on my own. If I’d ticked him off, he should tell me.

I was on the verge of asking him what was up, when he said, “Bear with me for a minute,” and pulled over in an empty church parking lot. “I want to make a quick call.” He looked up a number on his phone, dialed it, and asked to speak to the service department.

“Hey there,” he said. “I’ve got a Grand Cherokee that needs a 30,000-mile service. How much does that usually run? OK, hmm. When could you get it in? Oh, really? OK, I might do that. Let me call my wife to see if she can run me back to work. I’ll call you back. Thanks.” He hung up, absently tapped the side of his phone a few times, and then got back on the road to Memphis without a word.

“They’re not that busy,” I said.

“I hate it when people lie to me,” he said. “Especially when I don’t know why.”

“Optics? Maybe he was afraid the customers would get the wrong impression if they saw us interviewing his guys.”

“Then why not say that? And he had a perfectly good conference room.”

I couldn’t think of a good reason. Instead, I said, “Do you remember – when did you tell him we were from Memphis?”

He frowned. “It might have come up when he was talking about where he went to college. I gave him my card when we left, but before that…” Neither of us could remember mentioning it, but then again, it’s the kind of thing you might not remember from a casual conversation. 

After a couple more miles, I said, “If I got Richard to help me track down some people who work there, and I contacted them at home…would you have any objection to that?”

He was quiet for a little longer, then said, “Be polite. And be careful.”

~~~

You might not believe it, but I can be polite and careful when I need to be. Two weeks later, I’d talked to six employees of Reaves Dodge who admitted to knowing Owen or Tara.

Betty the front desk lady told me at length how _shocked_ she was to hear about the theft allegations, because Tara was the _nicest_ little sweetheart. Betty didn’t know Owen at all. No doubt it was _all his fault_ ; he’d _pushed_ Tara into it, _obviously_. Never, _ever_ would have guessed that little _angel_ might steal so much as a ballpoint _pen_. Tara’s mother and younger brother lived in North Carolina, had I checked there? (Yes, ma’am, thank you though.)

The other five were mechanics. Three of them said Owen was a nice guy, good at his job, not a big spender, didn’t talk a lot, just a regular guy, you know? He’d grown up in a trailer with his mama, but she’d died a few years back, and he’d never mentioned any other family.

The other two mechanics said Owen was an asshole and a slacker, and they weren’t surprised that he’d been ripping off the company.

And none of them had any ideas about where he’d be now.

I dropped by the office on Friday afternoon to update Hank. “Branson and Harney, the ones who didn’t like him, they told me the service department had been having inventory control problems for a while. Said Russ had instituted some new security measures, and that’s how he figured out what was going on. They said maybe Tara and Owen knew each other before, that Owen had cooked up the scheme, and that’s the whole reason Tara applied to work in the office. _Both_ of those guys said that. In almost the exact same words.”

“A little too pat?”

“Maybe? But, hell, maybe those two just talked about it when it happened, and that’s the general consensus.”

“Hmm. Anything else?”

I told Hank about the most productive interview of the six, with a mechanic named Eddie. He was the only one who had invited me into his house, rather than standing awkwardly on the front step.

He and Owen had started at Reaves Dodge around the same time, and Eddie thought something had changed three or four years ago. Owen had gotten in trouble with the law, and served a few months.

I knew about that; that’s when I’d encountered him the first time. That one was a run-of-the-mill pickup, and I barely remembered it. I had a vague memory of him being confused by the entire situation, like he thought he had a rain check from court.

As soon as he got out of jail, Owen came back to work, but he was quieter than before. More withdrawn, less likely to smile and joke around. More likely to fly off the handle when he got stressed out. I asked if it had anything to do with Tara. No, said Eddie, they didn’t meet until Tara started at Reaves. He was pretty sure of that, but he wasn’t sure when they started dating, because they tried to keep it a secret.

I asked why, and that’s the only time I couldn’t get a straight answer. He got tongue-tied and stared at the floor. “Russ...Russ is sort of...he doesn’t like us grease monkeys to bother the office girls.”

I wasn’t sure what to make of that. If Owen and Tara were running an underground parts railroad, it would make sense to keep their relationship on the down low, but Eddie didn’t think that was it.

“I don’t know,” I said to Hank. “Maybe Owen was scamming Reaves and maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he got set up. If he was, though, I don’t know why he wouldn’t just go to court and plead innocent. Truth is, I don’t really care. I just want to know where he is now, and all we’ve got is dead ends.”

Hank leaned back in his chair. “If he’s buried so deeply we can’t find him, he’s not likely to show up anywhere close to here, is he? Maybe it’s time to put this one on the shelf?”

Fair point. I’d tried everything I could think of to dig up Owen, and couldn’t, and that in itself was reassuring. When Donnie asked if I felt like grabbing a beer or three with the guys that night, I said sure.

~~~

It was fun. I got a lot of, “Hey, buddy! Great to see you!” but no one made a big fuss over me. I didn’t feel boxed in, for once, and I even forgot my usual habit of scanning for Owen in the crowd.

Donnie had us all in stitches with his story about the time a skip’s pit bull fell in love with Alex, and Alex retaliated by telling us about the time a skip’s grandma clocked Donnie upside the head with a literal frying pan.

“That’s not a weapon I’ve studied!” Donnie laughed. “Eastern melee weapons, I can handle, but the tactical frying pan is a Western weapon.”

“So if someone came at you with a tactical wok...” someone suggested.

“No, see, that’s a common misconception about the tactical wok – it’s not actually a weapon; it’s armor.”

Being able to sit around and laugh with people – I’d missed it more than I realized. One thing nobody tells you about getting older: it’s hard to hang onto friends. I’d had a tight group in school, but Greg went to college in Virginia and stayed out there, Liz moved for a job, Bailey got married and had a kid...stuff happens. Life happens. You miss people, but you move on. If you’re lucky, you find other people you vibe with.

Donnie and Alex, Richard and Amy – they were friends, and more than friends. That’s why I’d been so determined to make myself get over North Carolina. They were always there to back me up, so I had to be there for them.

Around midnight, we all headed out. Some folks were talking about hitting Steak ‘n Shake for late-night cheese fries, but I didn’t want to come within smelling distance of that much grease. I headed home.

It had been so long since I’d been out late, I’d forgotten to leave the light on for myself. The key skittered over the lock, but finally it cooperated with me.

I opened the door and something slammed into me from behind.


	3. Chapter 3

It happened so damn _fast_ , you know? I didn’t even have time to turn on the light. One minute, I’m walking into my house; two seconds later I’m on the floor; and two seconds after that, I’m pinned under three or four guys, and one of them has his nasty tobacco-stinking hand clamped over my mouth.

I had no idea what the hell was going on. All I knew was that someone had jumped me on my way into _my own damn house_. I would have killed them with my bare hands if I could. I kicked hard and almost got away from at least one of them, but _almost_ doesn’t win any prizes in that situation.

A knife slammed point-first into the hardwood floor right in front of my eyes, and a deep grating voice told me to relax or he’d cut my throat.

You ever want to laugh at the absolute wrong moment? It was completely nuts that _this_ was happening _here_ after everything that had already happened. Call it childish, but I felt like it wasn’t fair. And now this asshole’s telling me to relax? Really?

I didn’t laugh. I kept my eyes on the knife blade while at least two of them yanked my arms behind me and duct taped my wrists and ankles. Maybe I should’ve been freaking out more, but I’d gone straight past that into a furious _whatthefuckever._ Of course this would happen. Although, one tiny calm part of my mind thought it was weird how coordinated they were. They weren’t talking or getting in each other’s way, even when they flipped me onto my back while the knife guy kept his hand over my mouth.

I still couldn’t see who had jumped me. Some light from the street came in through the picture window by the door, but they were silhouetted against it, and then the deep-voiced guy shoved my chin up, so all I could see was ceiling. You know where you can find your pulse on the side of your throat? He set the point of the knife right there, with enough pressure to freeze me solid.

“I got some questions for you,” he said. “Tell me the truth and keep your voice down.”

He waited a moment to let that sink in, and then moved his hand like one inch, so he could shut me up again if I got loud.

“Do you know where Owen Casey is?” he said.

Up to that point, I’d assumed this was some kind of robbery, like some assholes had told some other assholes where to get drugs, and they’d gotten the wrong house. Like I said, the duplex wasn’t in the best part of town. The last thing I was expecting to hear was Owen’s name.

“If I knew where Owen Casey was, I’d fucking kill him,” I said to the ceiling. Maybe a little too much truth. “No, I don’t know.”

“You got a general area where he might be at?”

“No.”

“This is what you do, Cade,” said the gravelly voice. “No idea at all?”

I could have said something about the Atlanta connection, but I wasn’t in the mood to cooperate, because fuck him, whoever he was. That voice was distinctive, not anyone I’d met before, I was sure. Rural Tennessee accent. “No,” I said furiously. “I’ve been looking, but I haven’t found shit.”

“You ran into him in North Carolina. Did he give you anything?”

“ _Give_ me anything?” I said incredulously. And thinking, _ran into him?_ He ran into _me_ , like a goddamn cement truck. “What the fuck would he have wanted to give me?”

The knife pressed up and in a tiny bit. “Did he give you anything?”

“No, he didn’t _give_ me anything.” Other than a concussion, a bunch of bruises, and a PTSD hangover. Something trickled down my neck, either sweat or blood, I couldn’t tell which.

“Did he try to spin you any excuses for why he ran off and skipped bail?”

“No.”

“What did he have with him, when you saw him?”

None of his questions made any sense. He was fishing, but I had no idea for what. “With him? Like what was he carrying? A backpack.”

“What did he have in that?”

“Fuck if I know.”

“He didn’t tell you what was in the backpack?”

“No. Why the fuck would he?”

He didn’t answer. A faint beep came from the other side of the wall. Luis or Charles must have been in the kitchen next door, heating something in the microwave. If this asshole did end up knifing me, I thought, I needed to fucking die quietly. My neighbors were used to weird nighttime noises from my part of the house by now, but they might knock on my door to check on me. I didn’t want to think about what would happen if those little guys ran into these assholes.

Hands clamped around my arms and legs and flipped me back face down, still with that coordination, and still without a word. The only direction the knife guy gave any of them was when he said to somebody, “If he makes a sound, tape his mouth.” I think that was mainly for my benefit, though.

One of the goons moved up and put a knee between my shoulder blades, and the rest of them tossed my house. I’d gotten rid of a lot of crap when I moved, so I didn’t have much to look through, but I could hear them going through cabinets and drawers.

I probably should have been more scared, but I was seriously considering if this was just me having another nightmare. It seemed familiar, not being able to see what was attacking me and all, but the biggest problem I have in the nightmares is that I want to scream, and I can’t. Lying there on the floor, I thought I could scream if I wanted to, but I couldn’t see how that would help at all.

Footsteps came back toward me. I didn’t know what was about to happen, but I had a few guesses, and none of them were good. The guy who had his knee on me stood up, the front door opened, and…they left. Walked out the door without a word, and closed it behind them.

I was half afraid I hadn’t heard right, and one of them was still lurking behind me. I picked my head up, and when nothing happened, I flipped over. Sure enough, they were gone.

I threw myself toward the front window. It probably looked a little bizarre, the way I executed that maneuver, kind of a flip-roll-lunge, but I managed to be up on my knees looking out just in time to see an old 4Runner roar down the street.

I didn’t get a plate, and I wasn’t even sure what color it was. It looked silver or light bronze in the streetlights. I didn’t even know if it was their car, but no one else came by. I sat down and cussed at everything in the world.

After I’d gotten that out of my system, I could work on getting loose. It wasn’t too hard; they’d been in a hurry, so a few good yanks were enough to get the tape to start tearing.

Once I was free, it was like, _OK, now what?_ Maybe I should have called the cops, but I didn’t see the point. I wasn’t hurt, hadn’t had anything stolen that I knew of yet, and I couldn’t give any kind of description of the assholes. After midnight on a Friday night, the cops would have more urgent calls to deal with.

Owen Casey. I wasn’t happy about having his name pop up unexpectedly, especially in my own damn house. That’s the phrase that kept echoing through my head, and I thought, _Goddammit, I’m going to have to move again._

I didn’t know if Hank would still be awake or not, so I texted him. _Text me back when you get this._

Almost immediately I got back, _What’s up?_

_I just got jumped in my own damn house._

I was starting to add what they’d asked me – typing on a phone is a little slow when your hands are shaking, and autocorrect only goes so far – but the phone rang, and it was him.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.

“I wish.”

“Are you OK?”

“Yeah.”

“Don’t tell me you’re fine if you’re not.”

Fair point, but I really was more or less OK, and there was something more important on my mind.

“They asked me if I knew where Owen Casey was.”

Silence on the other end for a few ticks. “They weren’t by chance looking for something else as well, were they?”

“Yeah. They went through all my stuff. Didn’t say what they were looking for.”

He let loose with some creative profanity, and then asked if I was still at home.

“Right now I am, but as soon as I can pack a duffel, I’m going to go find a nice anonymous motel.”

“Don’t bother; you can stay at my place. I’ll pick you up in twenty.”

“You don’t have t–”

“Pack, Cade. Twenty minutes.” He hung up.

I packed on autopilot, cleaning up as I went. Every single drawer and cabinet door was open, and my stuff was moved around, but nothing seemed to be missing. The clothes in the dryer had been dumped on the floor, and the washer door hung open. Out of curiosity I checked my fridge, but apparently no one thought I’d be hiding anything under the lettuce.

My Glock was still in my bedside table’s drawer, which was a nice surprise. I’d been expecting I’d have to report another one stolen. They’d just shoved it to the side. Handguns are easy to sell on the black market, and a nearly-new Glock would go for decent cash, but guns are serialized. Traceable. Someone on that crew was disciplined and smart.

~~~

On the drive back to Hank’s place, I told him everything the asshole in charge had asked me. “That call you got from Tara’s mama,” I said, “the fact that they wanted Owen, and something he had – this has got to be the same people.”

“And they knew you wouldn’t fall for fake FBI agents,” he said.

“I wish I knew what the hell they were looking for.” 

“Something smaller than a backpack, sounds like.”

“And I don’t know why they thought Owen would try to make excuses about why he skipped,” I said. “Do we ever care about that?”

“It doesn’t matter if you cared, the question was if he talked,” said Hank. “This is someone he was working with, someone he’s got information on. They’re afraid he might bring some heat on them.”

That sounded all too plausible. “Well, I told them he didn’t tell me anything. I hope they believed me.”

“We’re not going to rely on hope,” Hank said. “We’re going to find Mr. Casey, and get him locked up, and then we’re going to ask him about these friends of his, or ex-friends, and get _them_ locked up.”

I don’t see Hank look angry much, and you don’t want to be the target when he is.

I stayed at Hank’s place that night, or what was left of that night, anyway. It was the second time I’d done that. He and Kim have a couple of spare bedrooms for when the kids come to visit, and he’d made me stay at his place for a night when we came back from North Carolina. Since I wouldn’t stay at the hospital, he’d wanted to keep an eye on me long enough to make sure the bumps on my head didn’t turn into anything worse. At least this time I was in better shape. Physically, anyway.

I didn’t want to impose on Hank longer than I had to, so in the morning I told him I’d be fine back at home. “I’ll just remember to leave the light on if I’m going to be out late. And I might cut the bushes back away from the door.”

“Good plan.”

“Do you have a flamethrower I could borrow?”

A smile flitted across his face. “Your landlord might object to that approach.”

“Hey, fastest way the get the job done.”

I went back home and called my landlady, who said it was OK with her if I cut the bushes back, and Luis let me borrow his hedge trimmer. I didn’t tell him what had motivated me to do yard work all of a sudden – those goons weren’t any danger to him – but I did apologize again for any noises he’d heard lately from my side of the house, or might hear, since I’d had a rough couple of days.

I said it because I was more or less expecting to wake up screaming again. It’s not the greatest thing, when you’ve already had nightmares about being attacked in your house, to _actually_ get attacked in your house.

But it wasn’t nightmares, the next few nights. Nightmares might have been better. I couldn’t sleep long enough to even _have_ dreams. Everything woke me up: every car driving by, every creak the house made, every time the fridge condenser kicked on. I got through the days with coffee, which probably didn’t help with the sleeping, but I needed to function. Owen had to be out there somewhere. And whoever the goons were, neither they nor Owen would be a threat to me anymore if I could just _find_ the fucker and put him away.

~~~

To my surprise, Donnie was just as pissed as Hank had been, when he found out about what had happened. 

“What the fucking _fuck?”_ Donnie fumed. “I have a powerful need to kick someone’s ass.”

“Comes from living in a dojo,” I said. He doesn’t really, but his apartment is upstairs from where he teaches his classes when he’s not out on runs with us. He’s got a black belt in something or other, and he teaches whatever kind of class anybody wants to pay him for. Kids’ classes, self-defense, tactical and protection stuff, even plain personal training. We were hanging out in his apartment Sunday afternoon, and I was going to ask him what I should have done when the assholes jumped me, but he was too busy being mad.

“Un-frickin-believable. That’s _insane_.” He got up to pace to the kitchen and back.

“You’re taking this worse than I did.”

“I can’t believe _that night_ …. that was the first time I’ve seen you relax since North Carolina. In a crowd, I mean.”

“Maybe it’s a sign,” I said gloomily.

“It’s a sign I need to kick someone’s ass.”

“I’d be in favor of that, but I don’t know where else to look.”

“Blakeley County.” He tossed a little square pillow up in the air and caught it with a roundhouse kick. It landed with a _foomp_ in the precise center of the sofa. “Do you know _anybody_ there?”

“Nobody helpful. I’ve got sort of an ex who moved out there a few years back, but nothing like a work contact.”

“Sort of an ex? Are you still ‘sort of’ dating? Friends with benefits?” he grinned.

“No, assjacket, ‘sort of an ex’ meaning I’m not sure we were ever technically dating. We were friends, and we’re still friends, we just don’t get together much since she moved.”

“Could be a good time to relight the flame.”

“There _wasn’t_ a flame, that’s what I’m trying to tell you,” I said, but he wasn’t listening.

“You never know what she might know,” he said earnestly. “Or what contacts she might have. What’s her name?”

“Liz.”

“Call up Liz and ask if you can pick her brain. Take her to dinner.”

He pestered me until I gave in. He was right, it wasn’t like it would hurt anything. Worst that would happen would be she wouldn’t be able to help, and I’d be right where I started.

~~~

I texted Liz to ask if she had time to talk about a case I was working on, and she suggested I could swing by her place for dinner Tuesday night. I was like, “You don’t have to feed me,” and – typical for her – she agreed she didn’t have to, but she was going to anyway.

Tuesday evening, I hit the highway again, the same route as we took to the dealership, but Liz has a place that’s more up in the hills, backing up to the state park that straddles the Blakeley-Coster county line. It’s a decent-sized cabin, and I wondered if it would bother me, but I was fine because it’s a totally different vibe. The North Carolina cabin was all dark colors and bears, and Liz’s place is warm colors and birds. Plus, Amy’s parents’ place is a rental, and it feels like it. You walk into Liz’s cabin, with the cats sitting by the fireplace and the afghans she made herself, and you know it’s a home.

She hadn’t seen me in a while, so after she hugged me, she was like, “Hon, what the hell happened to you? Did you forget how to eat? Get your butt into my kitchen.”

Her house smelled fantastic. It’s one of those with one big area for the kitchen, dining room, and living room. Vegetable beef soup was simmering in a pot on the stove, and on the counter next to it, a pan of cornbread was sending up wisps of steam.

We sat at the table and ate and caught up on what had been going on with both of us, and I told her my current target was a Blakeley native named Owen Casey; that we’d almost caught him in North Carolina, but things went a little sideways and he got away.

I told her what we’d already tried, and who I’d talked to, this second time around. She listened to me until I ran out of words, and I finished with a lame, “So, uh, if you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.”

She cocked her head at me. “What happened in North Carolina?”

Hell, the one thing I didn’t want to talk about, and it was the one thing she picked up on. “It’s not – I just want to find this guy, so it doesn’t really matter what happened back then.”

“It may not matter to finding your skip,” she said, “but it matters to _me_ because it clearly matters to you.” She put her spoon down. “Hon, I don’t know if anyone’s said this to you in so many words, but you look like shit. When you mention North Carolina, you look worse. You don’t have to go into any details you’re not free to share, but I have to ask: would you be better off if you handed this case to someone else?”

I actually considered it for a minute. “No, I don’t think so. The feds are looking for him, but he’s not a special case to them, so they’re not going to put any extra—”

“But it’s a special case to you,” she interrupted. “Why?”

“It’s…can we just say it’s personal and leave it at that?”

“We can, but that doesn’t change my question. Are you taking it too personally?”

I gave in and told her the two-minute version of what had happened. I’d gotten used to not telling anybody, because there’s no way to casually talk about “that time I got kidnapped by a skip” without the other person going all bug-eyed. Not that I’d told a lot of people, but I swear every person I’d told had the exact same reaction: “Holy shit, dude, are you _serious_?” It would be funny if it wasn’t so annoying.

Liz didn’t do that. She nodded and shooed me into the living room. The fire had died down while we were eating, so she moved the screen to add more logs. “How did you get separated from the other guys?” she asked. “I know y’all usually hang together on these jobs.”

“I…well…it’s sort of a long story.”

“I have time. You have time.” She finished stirring up the fire and went back to the kitchen.

I explained about Amy’s parents’ cabin, and going back to get our stuff from it, while she cleared the table and put the dinner leftovers away. Then she asked how Owen had found the cabin, and I admitted we didn’t have a clue, then or now.

She came back with two mugs that smelled sweet and spicy and a little boozy. “Hot apple cider with spiced rum,” she said, and we kept talking.

I hadn’t realized there was that much to tell, but I told her stuff I haven’t told anyone else. I hated talking about it; I hated _thinking_ about it, because it was so embarrassing that it happened in the first place, and worse that I couldn’t get over it. But Liz – she knows me, good and bad parts both. If she was going to get judgey, she would have done it a long time ago.

I told her the whole miserable story, and all the shit since then too, since she asked. How I kept flinching when something moved the wrong way in my peripheral vision, and why I was a little scrawnier than usual, and about the nightmares. I told her I’d thought about quitting Hank’s crew entirely, even though I had no idea what I'd do after that, other than stepping in front of a train.

I hadn’t said that last part to anyone else, even the shrink. Everybody knows a shrink has to figure out how serious you are, and whether or not they need to get you into a hospital. But sitting there on Liz’s sofa, watching the coals in the fireplace flicker and glow, I told her the truth, and I told her the reason for it.

“What bothers me most…what if I never get any better? What if this is as good as it gets for me? I remember what it was like to feel OK. To feel _normal_. This time last year, I looked forward to every job we got. I never had to worry about whether my own brain was going to screw me over at the worst possible time. And now that’s always on my mind. Finding Owen...it might help, and it might not. It’s kind of a Hail Mary. I don’t know what else to do.”

Liz put her mug down on a side table. “Oh, sweetheart. I can’t believe you’ve been working and dealing with this for six months. Well, no, I take that back. I _can_ believe it, because I know how strong-willed you are. But that’s a heavy load for anyone to carry.”

I started to say I wasn’t feeling all that strong, but she said, “Love, I listened to you, now you listen to me. You know I’m always straight with you. I never have held back on telling you what I think.”

“Me or anybody,” I said.

“True. So here’s what I think. I get that you feel brittle and not like yourself. Hon, that’s how you _should_ be feeling. Not a single person on this earth could go through an experience like that and bounce right back.

“I think you’re dealing with it better than you realize. I hear what you’re telling me – it’s miserable, and there are days you’re tempted to give up. But you _haven’t_. That’s what I mean about strength. You went to Hank with a proposal that might help you. You’re working the problem. Keep doing that, and you’ll be on the right track.”

The fire popped, and she glanced at it, then looked back at me with a mischievous twinkle in her eye. “Think of it this way, hon. Some people are like Ferraris: have one fender bender and you might as well call them totaled. But there’s a reason you get along with that Charger of yours. Both of you can handle a few hits. You’ll look like crap for a while, but it’ll buff out.”

That got a legit laugh out of me, picturing myself as a dented Charger. She grinned back. “How long have I known you, babe? Trust me; it’ll take some time, and it’ll take some work, but you can do this.”

We kept on talking about psychology and trauma and I don’t remember what else until almost 10, and I wasn’t sure how much of the buzz in my head was lack of sleep, and how much was rum. I rubbed my temples and decided I was just tired. “I might have to get some coffee from you before I head home.”

She looked at me skeptically and said, “You don’t look like you should be driving. You look like you have the world’s worst tension headache,” and before I could correct her, she reached up and took over rubbing my head. Honestly, it’s hard to tell someone to stop that, even if you vaguely think you should. And then she decided that was a bad angle, so next thing I knew, I was lying on the couch with my head in her lap.

I could blame the rum for that, but it was a lot of things. There’s something special about Liz that I’ve never been able to figure out. She feels safe, somehow. Between the heat coming off the fire’s embers and Liz’s gentle fingers, I could feel bits of me relaxing that I didn’t even know were tense. I could _breathe_ better than I had in weeks. I closed my eyes to concentrate on that feeling; I wanted to save it and remember it.

“If you keep that up,” I said, still with my eyes closed, “I’m going to melt right into this couch.”

She laughed, a quiet chuckle above me. “That’s OK, love, go right ahead.”

She finished rubbing my head and drifted her fingers through my hair while we kept talking. Or at least, she talked to me, and I think I answered. I could hear one of her cats purring from the spot he’d claimed near the fireplace, soaking in the heat and idling his little motor, and I thought, _Fuzzy buddy, you’ve got the right idea_.

The next thing I remember after that is opening my eyes and blinking at the orangey-pink sunlight beginning to filter in through the east window. No Liz, just a pillow under my head, and a fuzzy red and brown afghan tucked around me. I felt a little strange, not in a bad way, and it took me a minute to put my finger on it. I felt _rested_. I’d slept through an entire night without dreaming or waking up once.

“Morning, hon!” said Liz, as she came down the stairs. “Do you still like omelets for breakfast?”

“Aw, come on, you can’t make me breakfast too. I’ll think you’re flirting with me.”

“Don’t worry, this is a 100% no-ulterior-motive breakfast,” she promised.

“Dammit,” I sighed, pretending to be disappointed. Mostly pretending.

She echoed my dramatic sigh and threw her hands in the air as she made her way into the kitchen. “There I go again, seducing men with my kitchen witchery.”

“Seriously. Your cornbread has me questioning all my life choices.”

“You are such a tease,” she laughed.

“Are you sure I’m teasing?”

She had opened the fridge, and turned back to me with her hand on the door. After a pause that went on long enough for me to open my mouth to walk that back, she grinned and said, “Hon…that’s a whole ‘nother conversation, and you and I should both have some coffee first. But with everything you’ve got going on, you don’t need to fall into a new relationship right now, even a new-old one.”

“In that case, I’m making the omelets,” I said.

I folded eggs around ham and cheese while Liz made coffee and toast. I make a pretty mean omelet, if I do say so myself. I hadn’t bothered in the longest time, but I hadn’t lost the skill, and Liz complimented me on them after we sat down at the table.

“So about your case,” she said. “You said Owen was working as a mechanic for Reaves Dodge, right? And he and Tara were stealing stuff from the service department?”

“Yeah, that’s all we know. The case file isn’t too detailed, and your sheriff’s office told us to get lost.”

She stirred her coffee, watching the spoon make little dark whirlpools. “I’m not surprised. One thing you may not know about Blakeley County, we’ve got more Reaves than a deer has ticks. The family has lived here for generations, and they’re rich. Maybe not by Memphis standards, but by local standards, they’re king of the mountain, almost literally. This state park back here behind us used to be Reaves land.

“See, Bill and Maryellen Reaves, who own the dealership, their dad owned a sawmill up north of here. He would buy up property, cut the timber off it, and then sell the land for a profit. This valley was too hard to get logging equipment into, back in that time anyway, so he built a house up above the river and used it as a hunting and fishing lodge. Later, the family donated most of the land to the state, for the park, but they still have an in-holding where the lodge is.

“So long story short, they’re loaded, and just about anything that needs a sponsor around here, from the food pantry to the county fair, depends on their support. And of course money equals power, right? Our county mayor is John Reaves McCall, he’s Bill’s cousin. You want to guess who the county sheriff is?”

“Another Reaves?”

“Ernest Reaves. He’s Bill and Maryellen’s son, Russell’s older brother.”

“So then…oh. Oh, shit.”

“Stealing from the Reaves would be pretty damn bold. And once they caught him…” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t want to be him in that jail.”

Even with the way I felt about Owen, it made my blood run a little cold. In these rural counties, the sheriff is the chief law enforcement officer, and there’s no real oversight to speak of. “Wow. Yeah. They could rough him up if they wanted to, or worse, and who’s going to argue? They could say he was resisting.”

“They might not even have to make excuses. Most people around here would say he deserved it,” she said. 

“Huh. That might answer something else we couldn’t figure out,” I said. “Owen had to know that as soon as he took Hank over the state line, that turned it into a federal case. He could have let him out of the car sooner, like anywhere up to the ‘Welcome to South Carolina’ sign, and not gotten the feds involved, but he kept right on going. Which means…”

“…the feds have first crack at him,” Liz finished.

“And even if the county gets him first, they’ll have to give the feds access to him. Damn.”

So that didn’t get me any closer to finding Owen, but it was interesting data. I helped clean up breakfast and got on the road home. Before I left, Liz made me promise to let her know if I started feeling extra-bad again.

“Hon, if you need anything, I’m here for you. You know and I know, you’re terrible at asking for help. So ask. OK?”

“I’ll ask for help, I promise.”

On the drive back home, I thought about the case, some, and I thought about how it would be nice to have someone to make omelets for on the regular. She hadn’t said no, when I made that not-quite-a-joke. Still, she was right, I needed to get my shit together first. Maybe if I found Owen, I could settle myself enough to be a decent partner for someone.


	4. Chapter 4

“You could use a girlfriend,” Donnie said, as we walked down to our favorite barbeque restaurant.

“She’s not interested in me like that.”

“Invite her out a few more times. These things take time to develop.”

“I told you, we tried that once, and it didn’t work. We’re friends.”

“In high school, you said. Y’all are older and smarter now. Is she cute?”

We got to the restaurant and had to wrangle getting a seat and ordering, so I didn’t have to answer that. I wasn’t sure how to explain it anyway. She’s not cute, and she’s not hot, exactly, she’s just Liz.

Right as our food showed up, my phone buzzed with a text.

_HEY I Got something for u_

“It’s Richard,” I said to Donnie. _Eating lunch, can it wait?_

_ATM in Dalton GA - Tara’s debit card used 3x in past month_

Donnie whistled when I showed him. “How the heck did he get that?”

The answer, when I asked, was a smug _Forbidden incantations on the magic box._

_Meaning don’t tell Hank?_

_Nah, its fine, he said go for it_

“Hank must be seriously ticked off about me getting jumped,” I said. “Thing is, though…it’s a lead, but it’s a pretty thin one.” There was no guarantee that the person using Tara’s debit card was Tara herself. For that matter, I didn’t even care about her unless she and Owen were still together.

We’re not cops, so we couldn’t ask the bank if they had an address for our skips. And even if we’d wanted to run surveillance on the ATM, there’d be no telling how long we’d have to wait. You have to sleep sometime.

“Not to mention,” said Donnie, “if we tried to stake out an ATM, some citizen would call the cops on us before we’d been there an hour. Here’s a question, though: how would they get to Dalton if they got rid of the rental in Atlanta?”

“Used the cash from the Corolla to buy a cheap car?”

“You’d think they’d want to conserve their cash, though,” Donnie said. “With no regular job, and a baby on the way...”

“Well, Owen knows cars. He could have stolen another one.”

“Could have, but did he? If he was paranoid enough to pull a plate switch on the world’s blandest rental, he does _not_ want to get caught in a ride that’s not his.” Donnie frowned at the table and drew rings with the water condensing off his cup. “They get to Atlanta and get rid of the hot car, and then what?”

“Then they’re stuck in Atlanta without wheels.” I said. “Also, homeless and pregnant. In a regular case, we could ask around at the shelters…but God, how many shelters do you think Atlanta has?”

“But we know – or at least we think – that somehow they get to Dalton. But they don’t have to have wheels at that point either. They could have Greyhounded it.”

“OK. So?”

“So what’s within walking distance of that ATM?”

~~~

Back at the office, Richard said he hadn’t thought to look, and we huddled around his desk as he pulled up the map.

The ATM was outside of a tiny little bank off one of Dalton’s main roads. The area was general retail, Hispanic flavor, plus a few chain stores and restaurants. Down the road from the bank, behind a mercadito and a taqueria, was one little apartment building.

Hank heard us talking and came in to see what the excitement was. He looked over my shoulder while Richard zoomed out and panned around.

I pointed at a scattering of markers just north of the apartments. “Nice little cluster there. Lewis Tire and Auto, Reyes Service & Repair, Collision Care of North Georgia...”

“It would be a good place for him,” Richard said. “Doesn’t mean he’s there.”

True, but there was nothing to rule it out either. It wasn’t anything we could give to the cops – especially if we weren’t going to bring up the bank records – so someone would have to drive down to Georgia to take a look. I asked Hank what our next couple of days were looking like, if he would need me.

“Slow down, bud,” said Hank, with a warning tone that brought me up short. “Charging out of here without a plan is not the way to do this.”

“But—"

“When was the last time you looked up the laws in Georgia? What are we allowed to do, or not allowed to do, in pursuit? If you get in a tight spot, who are you going to call down there?”

“I just want to know if he’s _there_. I’m not going to try to roll him up by myself.” That should have been obvious.

Donnie glanced at Richard, and they both had the same skeptical look that Hank had. Punching all three of them at the same time would have taken one more fist than I had.

“Even if you left now, it’d be dark by the time you got there,” Hank pointed out. “How dangerous is that area? Is it a place you want to explore blind on a Friday night? I’m not saying you can’t go, but you need to be smart about it.”

So now I was the stupid employee. Great.

“Listen, bud, here’s what I want you to do,” Hank said. “Take some time this weekend and do some research. Look up the laws. Look up the area. Find out who owns that building. Landlords usually don’t want to rent to wanted felons; the simplest thing might be to call them up and ask if they’ve got a tenant matching Owen’s description.”

“Or Tara’s,” Donnie said.

Hank paused to see if I had any input, then went on, “If Owen’s staying in one of those apartments, it’s not likely he’ll vanish in the next couple of days. Come back to me with some intel, and we’ll talk Monday.”

I nodded and left.

~~~

Donnie followed me out. “Dude…”

I unclenched my jaw long enough to say, “Not now,” and kept walking toward my car.

“Dude—”

“What?” I turned around so fast, he dropped half a step back. “Are you going to tell me not to be stupid too?”

“Dude—”

“All I want to do is fucking _look_. How does he know how likely Owen is to stay in one place or not? It wouldn’t be the first time we’ve missed someone by a day or two. And we don’t have a fucking clue what the landlord would be like. They might help us, or they might not want to say anything. They might go to Owen and say, ‘Hey, I got a phone call about you,’ and boom, he’s gone, and we’ve got nothing.”

_“Cade.”_

“What?”

“What do you know about Dalton?”

It wasn’t the question I was expecting. “Well… it’s not Crime Central, I know that much.” No matter what Hank thought, I wasn’t dumb enough to whistle down dark alleys. “It’s where all the carpet mills are at. Up in the North Georgia mountains, maybe five hours from here. I could get there and back in a day.”

“They got anything fun to do around there? Good hiking in those mountains?”

“How the hell should I know? I haven’t—”

“Then _maybe_ …we could go find out.” He threw a glance back at the office. “I don’t have any plans this weekend. Short road trip?”

There are friends, and then there are friends. I don’t deserve to have a friend like Donnie, and he certainly doesn’t deserve to be saddled with an idiot like me.


	5. Chapter 5

We elected to take my car, since it got better mileage than his truck. I packed an overnight kit and some gear, tossed it in the Charger’s trunk, and went to pick up Donnie at the dojo. He set his duffel next to mine and raised an eyebrow at me.

“Planning on getting shot at?”

I had my Kevlar vest on top of my gear. “Not _planning_ on it,” I said. “We’re tourists. But it doesn’t take up that much space, and if I did need it, I’d be glad I brought it, right?”

He narrowed his eyes. “Which holster did you bring?”

“Just this one,” I said innocently, gesturing at my waist. I’ve got a work holster that sits farther back, where my vest won’t get in the way if I have to draw. But if I’m not out hunting, I go concealed and inside the waistband. We all do; you never know when you might run into a former client with a grudge.

“Hmph. Some tourist you are,” he said, but he went back inside to get his vest.

I drove while he used his phone to do some of that research Hank was talking about. The crime reports for that area of Dalton weren’t any worse than our usual haunts around Memphis.

We talked about the best way to approach the place. We didn’t want to start randomly knocking on apartment doors, since it was possible, if not likely, that we might come face to face with Owen. “Although, I could do that alone,” said Donnie. “I never actually saw him, so he wouldn’t recognize me.”

“I don’t know, he might. Remember, he knew what you were driving.” We’d never figured out how Owen knew so much about our crew. “Besides, Tara would remember you, so it’d be just as much of a problem if she opened the door. Assuming they’re still together, that is.”

“He’d better not have run out on her,” Donnie said indignantly. “Ditching your pregnant girlfriend is a serious dick move.” He paused, and went on, “You realize, if she was pregnant in September…but not enough that any of us noticed…”

I added up months. “You think she’s had her baby by now?”

“Either has had, or will have soon, assuming everything’s gone well. That might make her easier to find. People tend to remember super pregnant short girls.”

“That would suck if it’s just her down there. If he ran out on her.”

“If he did, she might be pissed off enough to tell us how to find him. The problem would be…” he trailed off.

“Would be…?” I prompted.

“Well...we might not have a contract on her, but the Blakeley warrant is still out there. If we talk to her, technically we ought to let the cops know where she is. But...I don’t know about you, but I’d hate to do that to a new mama.”

“Getting soft-hearted on me?” I said. But he was right, it would be a hard call. If we found Tara, if she pointed us toward Owen, and we looked the other way while she vanished again…we could get nailed for obstruction of justice, if anybody found out about it.

“We don’t have to decide that now,” Donnie said. “We’re getting ahead of ourselves. How are we going to tell if either of them is there, alone or together?”

There were 16 units in the building. Donnie drew lines in his notebook and made boxes for 101 to 108, and 201 to 208. “We can do process of elimination, maybe,” he said. “Then if there’s an apartment we know he’s not at, maybe we can talk to those tenants.”

“I like that,” I said, “although, given the area – how’s your Spanish?” Amy’s our usual Spanish translator; she’s from Texas and one of the best memories of my life is of her cussing out Alex in Spanish and English simultaneously.

“I understand it better than I speak it,” Donnie said. “I can usually carry on a conversation, especially if I can look up words on my phone, so I don’t end up describing apartments as ‘small houses in one house’ or shit like that.”

~~~

Down in Dalton, we left the car in a strip mall’s parking lot and walked through a little patch of pine woods to check out the apartment building. It matched the pictures we’d seen online – two stories, dirty beige siding with ivy creeping up one side. Someone had felt the need to put steel cages around the outside air conditioning units.

There wasn’t a lot of activity at 8:00 at night. We marked off apartments 105 and 107, since they were occupied by families with kids, but those were the only windows we could see in from our angle. We crossed off apartment 103 after we saw a Hispanic lady in a bright multicolored dress taking groceries into that one. That left 13 more possibilities.

I suggested taking a walk over to the mailboxes. “Maybe there’ll be some mail in the trash with names on it.”

“Possibly,” said Donnie. “But we’re not prying open any boxes, so don’t even ask.”

“Come on, I’m not stupid.”

The mailboxes were off to one side of the building, under a little covered area, so the half-dead parking lot lights didn’t reach under there. Donnie pulled out his flashlight first. I’d reflexively reached for where my flashlight usually rode, and for the hundredth time I mentally cussed at Owen. I hadn’t found a good replacement yet for the one he’d stolen, one that would fit in the flashlight slot in my favorite backup mag carrier, so I always felt a little out of balance.

Donnie cupped his flashlight in his hand so it only let out a tiny thin beam, just enough to check around for a trash can, but we didn’t see one. A couple of dusty pieces of commercial mail were on the ground, but one was addressed to “Resident,” and one was addressed to a Jose Hernandez in apartment 206. Four down, maybe. Jose might be a current resident, or a former one.

Donnie clicked off his light and we debated whether it would be worth it to go dumpster diving. That’s even worse than going through one person’s trash, and usually you want to wear clothes that you don’t mind if you have to throw them out later. “Tell you what,” I said, “Let’s go see how much trash we’re talking about.” We skulked over toward the rickety fence that was supposed to hide the dumpster and looked in, and naturally the thing was almost full.

Donnie made a face. “Dude, I’m not digging through last Tuesday’s refried beans just to satisfy your—” He stopped, then elbowed me and pointed toward an SUV parked crookedly in a handicapped space. “Check it out. Tennessee plate.”

He was right; it was a Blakeley County license plate, and it was attached to a light bronze third-gen 4Runner.

This damn case, I decided, was actively trying to give me a heart attack. I reminded Donnie of what had happened to me in the duplex, and the car I’d seen afterwards.

“Good Lord,” he said. “So…if one of these is Owen’s place, there might be some assholes tearing it apart right now, whether he’s there or not.”

“Which one would be worse for us? Since it’ll probably be that one.”

“Equally bad. If it’s those guys that jumped you…if they were willing to get violent with you, they won’t hold back on him. And if he’s not there, and they don’t find what they’re after, they’ll still be out there looking for him.”

“Their intel’s as good as ours, if this is them,” I said. “I’d love to follow them when they leave, but with one car…” I wasn’t hopeful about our chances.

“Write down that plate number, and I’ll do a quick recon. Wait here.”

We don’t have the same resources cops have, so there was no way to run a plate at that time of night, but I wrote down the number anyway. Donnie eased up toward the SUV, circled it, and peered in through the windows. I kept an eye out for anyone else. We weren’t doing anything illegal, exactly, but in a place like that, people don’t call the cops if they think you’re up to something. They tend to take care of problems themselves. Donnie crouched down next to the 4Runner and reached up to check if it was locked.

An upstairs door slammed open. Three or four people boiled out, clustered in a knot, and lurched toward the stairs.

I flattened myself against the flimsy fence. Donnie’s quick as a snake; as soon as they turned to go down the stairs, he darted down the row and tucked in behind a rusty minivan. I had to just hold still and hope they wouldn’t look in my direction, but they were intent on what they were doing.

Which was, dragging someone with them, and being furtive and quick about it. Three on one, though their captive wasn’t resisting much. One of them moved to unlock the 4Runner, and I got a quick profile view of the guy in the middle of the pack.

An electric shiver crawled up my spine, and I couldn’t help breathing a stunned _fuck me_.

They dragged him into the back seat, and five seconds later they were tearing out of the parking lot.

Donnie came back over to me, and I told him what I’d seen.

“Owen, but no Tara?” he said.

We hustled up the stairs.

The door to apartment 201 wasn’t quite closed. We looked at each other. No telling who might still be inside, or if Tara was there or not. The smart move would have been to back off and call the cops.

We both cleared leather and edged our way into the apartment. Terrible place to get into a gunfight, and I was praying we didn’t have to. Any rounds we let go would punch straight through walls, floors, and ceilings. And our vests were still in my trunk, protecting fuck-all.

The place was trashed. Sofa cushions tossed every which way, drawers and cabinets hanging open, bunch of stuff on the floor. We were careful where we put our feet while we checked all the corners.

No one in the front room. No one in the kitchen. A hall door led to a bedroom, so Donnie carefully swept it by pivoting around the doorframe, but that was empty too, of people anyway.

“No Tara,” I said. “And they tossed the hell out of this place. They’re still looking for something.”

“I’m guessing Owen wouldn't talk.” Donnie pointed at a few red droplets on one wall.

“So they shoved him up against the wall and hit him a few times,” I said. “They should’ve called me. I’d have given them the discount rate.”

“Pretty sure Hank would veto that. He’d give us hell for being in here at all.”

“Well, he doesn’t need to know about it.”

We searched the apartment while we had the chance, praying that none of the neighbors had heard the noise and called the cops. I was willing to risk it. It was already Owen’s fault that I couldn’t walk a block without looking over my shoulder. In his case, I knew who I was looking for, but the assholes who jumped me…I couldn’t handle being on alert for random attacks forever. I had to find out who they were.

We worked as fast as we could. There was almost nothing useful. Although, we couldn’t help but notice the crib in the corner of the bedroom. Inside was a crumpled blue blanket decorated with cartoon spaceships, happy aliens, and a little bit of spit-up. Looked like Baby Michaels was part of the picture now.

I was digging through a trash can when Donnie called back to me from the kitchen, “Hey, come look at this.”

He’d found a note on the back of an envelope, in the middle of the wobbly kitchen table. Short and sweet – “Tara, call me.” It was signed “Ace.” A damp smear stained the right-hand side of the paper, an unmistakable shade of red-brown, right where someone’s knuckle would rest while scrawling a note.

“You think Ace is one of those goons you saw?” Donnie asked.

“Apparently. I wish I’d gotten a better look at them.”

“Does the name ring a bell? One of Owen’s associates?”

“Not that I know of…but ‘Ace’ is a nickname, so he might be on our list and I don’t know it.”

“Maybe.” He grinned. “I mean, we’re talking Tennessee here. Could be a given name.”

“I guess it could. I can get with Richard to see if we can turn up anything. If you’re done in here, we should head out.”

His smile faded. “We still don’t know where Tara might be, though. Where would she have gone with a baby at this time of night?”

“Does it matter? If she wasn’t here when the goon squad showed up, she’s probably fine.”

“But they know who she is, and they want to talk to her. A little girl like her, she doesn’t have any defense against ugly bruisers like that.”

“Well…she obviously knows them too, because Ace didn’t leave his number, so she probably knows them well enough to stay out of their way. Come on, we need to get the hell out of here.” I headed for the door, but he just stood there.

“These guys are _dangerous,_ ” he said heatedly. “You can’t—”

I’ve known him for a long time. “Dude, is it me, or do you have a thing for Tara?”

He turned a little red and shrugged. I’m not even kidding.

“Oh, for fuck’s _sake,_ Donnie,” I said. “She’s wanted for theft and for skipping bail, and she’s dating Owen fucking Casey…wait, let me rephrase that, she’s fucking Owen Casey, not to mention there’s this baby now.”

“Hey, look,” he said, turning redder, “you didn’t spend twelve hours in a car with her. She—"

“I’m sure she’s cute, but—” 

“It’s not that,” he insisted. “I mean, yes, she is. She’s got a smile like you wouldn’t believe, but—” 

“How the hell do you make a chick _smile_ when you’re taking her to jail?”

“That’s what I’m trying to say, that’s _her_. I got her to talk to me a little, and you’d be surprised, she’s tough. But she’s not, like, bitchy-tough. More like been-through-a-lot tough.”

I’d have tried to smack some sense into him, if I hadn’t thought that would end with me on the floor. “Well…that’s awesome, but we’re not going to find her or Owen by standing around inside their damn apartment with heart-eyes, now are we?”

He glared at me. “Speaking of bitchy-tough…”

“You wait, I haven’t even gotten started.”

“Listen, the point is, we know for a _fact_ that there are some violent assholes looking for Tara, and I’m not going to ignore that.”

“Fine,” I said. “What do you suggest?”

“I suggest you go back to the car and wait for me while I knock on a few of these doors here. The other tenants might have some leads.”

I argued that it wasn’t smart to split up in unfriendly territory, but he didn’t want me looming over his shoulder while he talked to deeply suspicious neighbors. We finally agreed that I could loom on the stairs, out of sight. Before we left, he scrounged up another envelope and wrote a second note with his cell number on it. _Tara, I don’t know what the hell’s going on, but please call me if you need my help. –Donnie._

“You think she’ll trust you?”

“Probably not, but at least the offer’s there.”

I stood on the stair landing halfway down while Donnie talked to the folks in 202 and 204. He was probably right; people were more apt to talk to one earnest guy at their door than a pair of strangers. I still didn’t like it. I wasn’t sure if I could get to him in time if he needed me. I set my feet, took hold of the railing, and watched Donnie’s shoulders.

Most people turtle when they get tense; their shoulders climb up toward their ears. When Donnie sees that shit’s about to go sideways, he goes loose. His shoulders drop, and his right foot might slide back a half-step. When I see that, I head for whoever’s next to the guy Donnie’s looking at, because he’ll take care of his guy, and I just need to make sure he doesn’t get double-teamed.

With him at the door, and me on the landing, I couldn’t see how many people were in the room. All I could do was listen close to see if I could guess. His story was that he was a friend of Tara’s, and he was afraid she was in trouble. He left his phone number and some cash with both sets of neighbors and told them all he wanted was for her to call him. He tried apartment 203 too, but no one answered the door, and we didn’t think anyone else would be likely to have interacted much with our skips.

“You might as well have lit that money on fire,” I predicted, as we walked back across the parking lot.

“Cash gets people’s attention,” he said. “So what now?”

“Home, I guess, unless you have any better ideas.”

We got back in the car, and I headed for the highway. “God, I hate that those guys in the 4Runner know me and I don’t know them,” I said. “We can get Richard to run the plate in the morning, but we need a reason, one that doesn’t include us sneaking down here. Did you see anything when you reconned it?”

“Not much,” he said, moodily staring out the window. “It was pretty clean. Had a parking sticker for one of the state parks, but who knows how many—”

I nearly drove over the curb. “Which state park?”

“Which one? I don’t know if it said. Is there one near Blakeley County?”

“Fuck, yes,” I said, and told him about the park that’s practically in Liz’s back yard. “She said the Reaves family still has a hunting cabin up there. A holding, or something.”

“In-holding, probably,” said Donnie. “Private land in a federal or state area. But how would that tie in?”

I took the northbound on-ramp toward home, and we tried to work out what the Reaves involvement might be. It was understandable they’d want Owen apprehended, but going out and personally kidnapping him seemed like a stretch. If they knew where he was – which had taken us weeks and some luck to find out – they could have called up Ernest the sheriff and had him use law enforcement channels to get Owen picked up legally.

“Didn’t want to deal with extradition?” Donnie suggested. “That sheriff’s office might not care too much about exactly how he ended up in custody, so they send a few boys to yank him out of Georgia to save time…”

“Maybe they wanted to get ahold of him before the feds did,” I said. “But don’t forget, we’re thinking this is the same crew that jumped me at my place, and maybe even the ones who showed up pretending to be feds at Tara’s mama’s trailer. That takes balls.”

“Or desperation,” Donnie mused.

“Maybe they’re pissed off about getting scammed,” I said. “Principle of the thing. They can’t let it go. They can’t let him win.”

Donnie gave me an ironic look, but only said, “Whatever the reasoning, we’re still basically where we were.”

“Yeah, out of leads. I guess we should check with the county lockup in Irvine tomorrow. If he’s not there…hell, I don’t know.” I was not in a good mood. I’d gone down to Georgia ready to be disappointed. And then my skip had turned up after all, just in time for someone to steal him from me.

“Buck up, bud,” said Donnie. “Let’s get back home. We can run that plate in the morning and see what that gives us.”

“We still have to find an excuse for how we happened across it,” I reminded him.

Donnie thought the best line was that we’d gotten the info from a tip, and we tried to come up with a likely tipster. “For a Blakeley plate, it’d most likely be someone from the county. Your girlfriend by the park, maybe?”

“It wouldn’t be Liz, she was just filling me in on county politics. And she’s not my girlfriend.”

He acted like he didn’t believe me, and I told him it wasn’t anything like a date, and I hadn’t been planning to stay overnight, I’d just fallen asleep on the couch.

“You’re telling me,” he said skeptically, “with all the problems you’ve had sleeping, you went to sleep in a strange place, just like that?”

“Yes, I did, and no, I have no idea how.”

“Maybe she slipped you something. Did your drink taste funny?”

“No, _dad,_ it was cider and rum.”

“Arrr, ye been keelhauled by Cap’n Morgan,” he said in his best Jack Sparrow voice, and I cracked up.

“ _Dude,”_ I protested, “I’m trying to _drive_ here. Do you want to end up in the ditch? Because this is how you end up in the ditch.”

We were still laughing about that when Donnie’s phone rang. He answered it without really looking at it, and then sat straight up. 

“Tara? Holy shit, babe, are you OK?”


	6. Chapter 6

I got off the highway at the next exit and parked by a gas station. From Donnie’s side of the conversation, I could tell Tara was super freaked out and not inclined to trust us. I didn’t blame her on either count. He reassured her more than once that he wasn’t after her, that we didn’t have that contract anymore.

He asked her what was going on, and who the hell Ace was, but it didn’t seem like she wanted to answer directly. She asked a question, and he looked surprised. “I might be able to do that. Just so you know, Cade’s with me. Are you OK with both of us…no, he’s not, I promise.” He listened a little more, and asked her to hold on.

“She says she knows what Ace wants. She’s got it. She wants our help.”

I blinked at him. “Details?”

“She won’t say. Wants to tell us in person.”

It sounded incredibly risky. Hell, I’d already had a knife at my throat on account of whatever it was. But…it occurred to me that if _I_ had what Ace wanted, maybe he’d be open to a deal. I could trade it to him for Owen. Stupid idea, but sometimes when you see a direct path to what you want most…at any rate, I agreed. Donnie wrote down an address and said we’d be there as soon as we could.

We fueled up with gas and coffee, then turned around to head back south toward Dalton.

“Why is it,” Donnie asked, “that I have to keep driving back and forth on highways on account of you?”

“Don’t complain, you’re not driving this time.”

“I won’t complain if you’ll listen to me and let me take point on this. She’s not sure she trusts me, but she’s _really_ not sure she trusts you, given your history with Owen.”

“Fine, you can talk to your girlfriend, I’ll stay out of it.”

~~~

The address Donnie had gotten from Tara led us to an industrial area not far from the apartment. Weedy parking lots and empty metal buildings with broken windows – not a great place to be at quarter ‘til midnight. Exactly what Hank had warned me about, and exactly what I said I wouldn’t do. I could feel myself going to Orange Alert, and tried to damp it down.

Our destination was Hernandez Motor Services, according to the neatly hand-painted sign. I pulled around back. Near the employee entrance, three guys were standing around, two with their arms crossed, and the third with both hands in his pockets.

“Are you sure about this?” I said. I was trying to sound calm, but I probably wouldn’t have fooled anyone, much less Donnie.

“She doesn’t have any reason to set anyone on us, as long as we’re straight with her,” he said. “Remember, she didn’t have to give us this address.”

We got out of the car and strolled up to the gentlemen by the door. Their faces were closed off, unreadable. I kept my hands in view, and so did Donnie.

 _"Hola, señor,”_ said Donnie. “Tara Michaels asked us to meet her here. Do we have the right place?”

One of them nodded grudgingly and led us inside. Another one followed us in, which made the back of my neck itch. They led us down a dimly lit hallway to a little office, one with a small desk, a few chairs, and a faded couch wedged into a corner. Tara was wedged into the far end of the couch, curled around a tiny baby in a blanket.

To be fair, Donnie’s not wrong. She is cute, with the big brown eyes and all, which stood out even more, pale as she was. She looked at us doubtfully, and I got the impression she wasn’t sure if this meeting had been a good idea. Donnie asked if he could sit on the other end of the couch, which was OK with her. I picked a chair and tried to stay out of the way. Our escort closed the door, but I didn’t hear footsteps leaving, so I figured they’d posted up in the hallway. Not sure if that was good or bad. I pulled my attention back to Donnie and Tara. 

“Please, babe,” Donnie was saying. “The more you tell me about who these assholes are and what they want, the better I can help.”

She shifted on the sofa, taking care not to jostle the baby, who was fast asleep. “If I tell you about it...” she said, “This has to do with things that _we_ did. Owen and me both. We’d talked about coming clean, and giving evidence that we had, in exchange for not going to jail. But we never figured out if that would work or not, and then we had to run.”

“Babe, remember, I’m not a cop,” Donnie said. “If you were to tell me about a crime you’re _planning_ to commit, I’d have to tell someone. But anything you did in the past, I don’t have a duty to report. All I know is what you tell me, and that’s not proof. I’m assuming y’all didn’t, like, kill anybody.”

She shook her head. “We didn’t kill anyone. And we really only stole one thing.”

~~~

We were there for a while, getting the whole story, and it was a doozy. Donnie asked questions from time to time, and she seemed fine with answering him, although she kept shooting nervous glances at me. Maybe she thought I had a grudge about North Carolina…which, to be fair, I did, but not directed at her. I settled down in the chair and tried to look nonthreatening.

According to Tara, the whole story about her and Owen stealing inventory was one giant made-up pile of crap. There was more to working for Russ Reaves than anyone suspected.

“His parents are so proud of him,” she said wryly. “The service department makes a great profit. He’s got a lot of sources for parts.”

“Let me guess, suppliers who might or might not be chop shops?”

She laughed a little. “He’s got his own.”

“He…Are you saying he _runs_ his own chop shop? Like literally stealing cars?”

She nodded matter-of-factly. “It’s not hard if you’ve got key blanks.”

I think I kept a straight face. At least I didn't laugh out loud. It couldn’t be true. Why would a guy like Russ Reaves take that kind of risk? It wasn’t like Mr. Tailored Suit was hurting for cash.

“Jesus,” Donnie said. “Wouldn’t that get obvious after a while? I’m not saying I don’t believe you, I’m just trying to get how he could do that for…how long has this been going on?”

“Years. But they don’t take cars from nearby, it’s always cities. Memphis and Nashville, Knoxville, Chattanooga. And they trade with other guys in the business sometimes. Birmingham, Atlanta, St. Louis…anywhere that’s not too far away.”

“Wow. And you found out?”

“I knew about it. When Russ was looking for a bookkeeper for the service department…” She wove her fingers into the edge of the baby’s blanket, rubbing her thumb along the fleece. “He wanted…I think he wanted smart, but not _too_ smart.”

Donnie snorted. “Missed the boat, didn’t he?” 

I very carefully did not roll my eyes, and made a mental note to tease the hell out of him later.

She threw him a tiny appreciative smile. “He never tried to hide what we were doing, not from me. He explained it, and – he can be really convincing. He’s got good reasons for everything he does. He – he’s good at getting people to do what he wants.”

Maybe he was, but he couldn’t have convinced her it was legal, I thought. Every skip, and I mean every single one, will tell you there’s a reason they broke the law, and it’s never, ever their fault.

“He showed me how he wanted everything recorded in the books,” she said, “so inventory wouldn’t be showing up out of nowhere. His cousin C.J. runs a big metal recycling operation with a scrapyard attached, where they sell car parts by the pound, so it was easy to fudge.”

“Huh. And Owen was a mechanic…boosting cars on the side?” Donnie guessed.

“No, not usually. He never liked doing it. It stressed him out too much. Ace and some of the other guys pick up the cars. Owen was part of the crew that stripped them down.”

I was starting to think Donnie had spoken too soon, when he told Tara we didn’t have any obligation to report what she told us. If she was telling the truth – and I still wasn’t convinced – this wasn’t a few lowlifes running a parts racket out of their garage. An operation on the scale she was describing – there was no way the sheriff wasn’t in on it. Russ’s brother had to know.

“So you two were working for both sides of Russ’s business,” Donnie said. “What happened?”

“Well, Owen and I knew each other, and we started going out, but we didn’t tell anyone at work. It’s hard to keep secrets there; everybody talks. It was fun, trying to keep people from finding out. Like pretending to be a spy. We used to leave little hidden notes for each other, and be careful to meet where no one we knew would see us. Or at least, no one who would go tell Russ.”

She’d smiled again, talking about Owen, and their secret fling. I wasn’t interested in her, and I definitely hadn’t lost my grip like Donnie, but he had a point about her smile. But as soon as she brought up Russ again, it was gone.

I’ve interviewed a lot of people. You have to listen to what they say, and how they say it, and what they don’t say. You put that together in your head with everything else you know, and see what direction it points you in. Sometimes it’s not a place you want to go.

There’s no good way to ask the question that popped into my head. And she was nervous about me already. I spoke up quietly, so I wouldn’t spook her.

“Tara, hon…you can tell me to go to hell if you want, but…who’s that baby’s daddy?”

She looked down at the corner of the blanket she’d been fiddling with, unrolled it, and slowly tucked it in.

“I’m not sure.” She touched the baby’s cheek with the back of one finger, and he sleepily turned his little face toward her hand. “He’s either a Casey or a Reaves.”

“Oh, _babe,”_ Donnie said, somewhere between sympathetic and horrified.

“It’s not what you think. I knew what I was getting into.” Her chin came up. “You’d have to work there, to understand how it was. The Reaves are a big family, but some of them are bigger shots than the rest of them. Russ doesn’t just run the service department, he _owns_ it. And his parents have been shifting more and more of the sales management over to him. Soon he’s going to own the whole dealership, top to bottom.

“If you want to work there – and a lot of people do, it pays better than almost anywhere else in Blakeley – you have to understand that the way to get by is to make Russ happy. Agree with him, tell him how awesome he is, do what he wants, give him what he wants.” Her face had gone from pale to pink. “And…I did. I wasn’t the only one. Some girls can’t deal with him, and they quit…but as long as Russ is happy, he’s charming and generous, and good to work for. He’s always saying he ‘takes care of his girls’ in the admin and finance department. All those mechanics can get pretty rowdy, but they were careful around us. Russ would give ‘em hell if they got out of line.

“That’s why Owen and I kept quiet when we started getting serious. We didn’t want to make Russ mad. He can be…he’s just…”

“Possessive?” Donnie suggested.

“More like jealous. He never made anyone do anything they really didn’t want to do, that’s not him, but he didn’t like competition either. It’s another reason girls have quit. And if you get on Russ’s bad side, his whole family knows about it, and rumors start flying around about you…” Her mouth quirked up in something that wasn’t really a smile. “If that happens, you need to just move to another county. I’ve seen it happen to people before.”

“Is that what made y’all leave? He found out about you two?”

Her fingers curled in the blanket again. “No, it wasn’t that. I was working late one night, closing the books for the month before, and Russ was working late too. His wife called him. He left in a hurry and told me to lock up when I was done.

“I only had one more journal entry to make, but my computer kept disconnecting from the network. Russ had left his laptop open, so I thought I’d use it to finish up. I was working on that when a box popped up at the bottom of the screen, an email from Russ’s brother Ernie. The subject said _Re: Owen_.

“I…I couldn’t ignore that. I clicked on it and I read the whole thing. Russ had emailed Ernie earlier that day, and he said they might have a problem. He thought Owen had guessed the truth about something. It didn’t say what. He wasn’t sure Owen would keep quiet. Ernie said that was bad news, and he asked if Owen had anybody that would miss him, like family, if he went anywhere. Russ wrote back and said no, Owen’s mama died a few years ago, and he had a few friends at the dealership, but that was it. And Ernie said they should get together to talk instead of emailing.”

“Jesus,” Donnie said. “Sweetie, take a deep breath. I don’t want you to pass out on me, OK?”

She _was_ looking pretty white, but not like she was about to pass out. To me, she looked furious. I know her type; you hurt someone they love, and they’ll climb up your shirt to punch you in the teeth.

Once she had a little color back, she went on, “I wasn’t sure exactly what he meant, but I knew it wasn’t anything good. I closed the laptop and took it with me to Owen’s place. I wanted to show him the email, but Russ has a password to get into the laptop. I thought I knew it; I used to know all of Russ’s passwords, but the one I had didn’t work.

“Owen believed me, though. He knew what Russ was talking about, but he wouldn’t tell me. It was something serious, more than the stolen cars, and it had something to do with Ernie. So we packed up and headed for my mama’s place that night.”

“Wow,” said Donnie. “But…hang on. When did you and Owen get arrested? Because we were after you for skipping bail.”

“We didn’t.”

“Didn’t what?”

“Didn’t get arrested.”

He wouldn’t have been any more confused if she’d said it in Chinese. “But…you had to. That’s how we got the contract to find you. The bail clause doesn’t get triggered until you miss your court date.”

She just shrugged. He floundered on, “They can’t make up an arrest out of thin air. How would that even work? There’s an arresting officer, and jail intake people. Court staff. There’s a whole paper trail.” He looked at me to back him up.

Bizarre as the idea was… “How many people would you actually need, though?” I asked. “In a county that size…one patrol officer, and maybe four people at the jail? If the sheriff’s got people he trusts, he schedules the right crew for one shift, maybe two, and there you go. Everything else is in the computer.”

“But they’d have had to appear in court at least once,” he objected. “So then you’d need a judge, a bailiff, a clerk, a—”

“Not necessarily. That’s what I mean about the computer. With a family that big and that tied in, they’ve got to have someone with access to the court system. Add a record to show they were in court on a certain day. Pick the oldest, most forgetful judge on the bench. Make up a bail amount. Enter it as paid. Done.”

“We didn’t know anything about it until later,” Tara said. “One of my friends called me to tell me the cops were looking for us.”

Donnie blinked a few times, and his forehead creased. “Babe, if that’s true… why didn’t you tell us any of this when we picked you up at your mama’s place?”

She sighed. “Now, I wish I’d said something…but I thought y’all were working for him.”

“For _Russ?”_

“Owen warned me that someone might try to pick us up. The only reason they would’ve gone to the trouble of making up arrests was so they could send someone official to bring us back. So it would look legal.

“I didn’t want my mama or my brother to get hurt, so I kept quiet. But when you and me were talking in the car, I started to think maybe y’all _didn’t_ know what was going on. I was trying to think of how to tell you, so you’d believe me. Honestly, if I’d said to you, ‘Please, you can’t take me to jail, I’ve never even been arrested, it’s some kind of conspiracy at the sheriff’s office’ – what would you have said?”

He glanced at me. I shrugged. We’ve heard a lot of crazy shit from a lot of crazy skips. “I don’t know,” he admitted. “I’d like to think I’d have at least looked into it, asked some questions, but…I don’t know.”

“And then you got that call from your boss.” She flicked another nervous glance at me. “I’m sorry; I wish everything hadn’t gotten so awful, but Owen thought the same as I did, that y’all were some of Russ’s guys. He was afraid you might hurt me.”

“But…you were _pregnant_. Would Russ have—”

“He didn’t know that. _I_ didn’t know until after we were in North Carolina. But if it was that bad, if it involved Ernie…” She shifted the baby closer to her chest. “Ernie scares me. Even before I saw that email, he made me nervous. He was always nice to me, when he came into the dealership, but...it seemed like an act, like he was holding something back.”

I wondered if Ernie’s “act” might extend to impersonating a federal agent. If he had a pack of like-minded, crooked cops in his corner…

“So who is Ace? Is he a sheriff’s deputy?” I asked.

“No, not him. He used to work in the body shop, but these days he takes care of things for Russ. Asa McCall is his full name.”

Russ’s deputy, more or less. “Ace wouldn’t happen to have a deep scratchy voice, would he?”

She nodded. “He’s been a smoker since he was a teenager.”

Bingo. “Sounds like Russ sent him out on a mission to get that laptop back. Is there anything else they’d be that worked up about?”

“No, that’s what he wants. There’s nothing else. Everything we own is in those bags there.” 

I hadn’t noticed Owen’s old backpack sitting in the corner. A wave of adrenaline squeezed my chest, and I had to remind myself to take a breath. The last time I’d seen it, it was mostly empty; now it was stuffed so full it could hardly zip. It was sitting by a big colorful bag of diapers and baby supplies, a faded kiddie car seat, and a ratty old duffel bag stuffed as full as the backpack.

“Didn’t y’all have more stuff back at the apartment?” Donnie asked.

“It’s mostly Alvaro’s. He’s the owner here. His uncle was living in that apartment until he got picked up by ICE and deported.” She smiled sadly. “Alvaro didn’t ask why Owen needed to be paid in cash. He understands needing to lay low and live quietly.”

“So that laptop…you have it now?”

“Yes.”

“Do you want to give it to me?”

“I want you to help me.”

“Well…we can talk about it," Donnie said. "What do you want us to do?”

“You saw the note that Ace left me. I haven’t called him yet. I want to tell him he can have the laptop if I…if we can get Owen back. And if you’ll go with me. There’s no way I can do this by myself.”

“Sweetie…I’m going to state the obvious here, but I want us all to be on the same page. You know what we do. If we have Owen in custody, we’ll have to turn him over to the feds.”

I managed to keep the YES PLEASE inside my head.

She nodded slowly. “That’s why it took me a while to call you. I…I’m scared for Owen. I don’t know what he’s into. I don’t know what they’ll do. At least with y’all, I know.”

“OK. So that would entail calling Ace, letting him know that you have the laptop and you want to trade. And then meeting up with him somewhere.” He rubbed his head. “If you don’t know what that email was about…”

We looked at each other.

“Tara, hon…do you mind if Cade and I need to talk this over?”

“You want me to leave, you mean?”

“I don’t want to be rude, we just need to put heads together for a minute. We could go back outside, if your friends in the hall don’t want us in here alone. They seemed a little tense, earlier.”

She smiled. “They like Owen, so they want to take care of me. It’ll be fine, I’ll talk to Alvaro for a few minutes.”

After the door closed behind her, Donnie leaned back. “You want to do this, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“You know it’s a bad idea.”

“Yeah.”

“Bad, meaning dangerous. Stupidly dangerous. And probably illegal.”

“I don’t know about _illegal_ ,” I said. “We’re returning someone’s stolen property and picking up a skip. Tara can say Russ Reaves is running a chop shop, but…”

“I didn’t hear anything that didn’t hang together—” 

“I’m not saying I don’t believe her. I’m just saying we aren’t concealing a crime if it’s only an _alleged_ crime. Right?”

He considered it. “I wouldn’t want to argue that in front of a judge.”

“And we’re talking about bringing in a guy with a federal warrant. Wouldn’t an actual crime matter more than hearsay about something else?”

“I don’t think it works that way. Hell, for that matter, I almost hate to take him in. If those Blakeley warrants were bullshit…those fuckers _used_ us. And if Owen thought we were Russ’s guys, I can see why he was so desperate to rescue her. The real assholes here are the Reaves. They’re the ones running this circus.” He glanced at me, and hurriedly went on, “I don’t…Shit, that sounded like I don’t care what he did to you, and I’m absolutely not saying that.” 

My fingernails were digging into my palms, so I made myself spread my fingers out. If I’d been anywhere else, I might have had louder words with him, but not with Tara and a couple of guys I didn’t trust right outside the door. I took a deep breath, and then another one to be safe.

“The situation wasn’t what we thought it was,” I said, “but at the end of the day, I don’t care why he did what he did. Remember, you wanted to take me to the hospital as soon as you saw me. I don’t care if he had good reasons or bad reasons. I’m not going to give him a pass because he jumped to the wrong conclusion.”

“Totally, yeah. I’m sorry,” he said anxiously.

I could feel my pulse thumping in weird places. Was he apologizing because he was sorry, or because he wanted me to cool down? That’s what pissed me off about the entire last six months: the way people acted around me, and _to_ me, had changed. Like they had to be careful. Donnie was better about it than most, but I caught him at it sometimes.

Maybe everyone secretly thought I’d gone crazy, or was about to. Hell, maybe everyone was right. I didn’t _feel_ crazy, but you don’t know if you are, do you? What I felt was tense, and frustrated, and tired, because nothing is ever simple, no matter how much you need it to be.

“It’s fine,” I made myself say. “Honestly…you’re probably right. If Hank found out we were involved in a deal like this, he’d fire both our asses on the spot. I might deserve that, but you don’t.”

“Come on, you don’t deserve it either.”

“I will if I can’t get my shit together. I don’t want to be the weak link. I don’t want to be the one that gets someone else killed. That security guard job is sounding like a better option all the time.”

“Shit, dude.” Donnie rubbed his eyes. We were both tired. “Look…let’s do this. Let’s round up Owen and get him locked up.” He looked up with a ghost of a grin. “And then maybe we can drop a hint with the TBI that they might want to look into Russ Reaves’s operation.”

“And by ‘look into,’ you mean...”

“At 0600 with a warrant and a door-kicker.”

“I’d pay to watch that,” I said. “But…seriously, I don’t want to drag you into something you don’t want to do just because I’m so fucked up.”

“I want to.” No hesitation.

“Why?”

“Because if this will help you get your shit together, then let’s do it. I don’t know how I’d deal with working on Hank’s crew without knowing you’ve got my back.”

I had no idea what to say to that. After the last few months, I wasn’t sure anyone should have that kind of trust in me.

“Don’t bullshit me,” I said. “You’re just hoping Tara will smile at you again.”

“Aw, crap, I was hoping you wouldn’t figure that out.”

~~~

We called Tara back in to tell her we’d try to help her make the trade.

She nodded and let out a shaky breath. “What do you need from me?”

“The laptop, for starters,” Donnie said, and she unzipped the backpack to pull it out. Sure looked like a basic little thing, to cause so much trouble. 

The three of us talked through the options. Even if Hank wouldn’t approve of what we were doing, Donnie and I were determined to plan this op as if he was standing there judging us.

“Backup plans,” said Donnie. “Start with the worst-case scenario, and then plan for that.”

“Worst case is they’d shoot all of us,” I said.

“This is Blakeley County, not Memphis,” Donnie said skeptically.

“So?”

“OK, we’ll go with that. How would we keep them from shooting us?”

“Don’t be there,” I said. “Let me take the laptop to Ace and get Owen from him. Y’all stay somewhere else. They can’t get rid of me because y’all will go to the cops.”

Donnie wasn’t sure he liked that idea. “If we’re talking worst case, how about this one: they take the laptop from you, and promptly cap you and Owen. Then they tell me and Tara that the deal’s done, and they don’t know where you two went after that.”

“If they hurt Owen, I'll tell everyone about how Russ runs his business,” Tara said.

“He’s had months to cover his tracks, though,” I said. “And he can blame any discrepancies on you and the scam you were supposed to be running.”

Donnie picked up the laptop and weighed it in his hand. “Does this have the original accounting records?”

“No, they’re stored on the server.”

“What the hell is on this laptop, then?” We pondered it for a minute, like it would give up its secrets if we looked at it hard enough.

“Do you think Richard would do us a favor without telling Hank?” I said.

“Depends on the favor, probably. What did you have in mind?

“If he could figure out the password, he could copy any evidence. Then it wouldn’t hurt anything to give it back to Russ.”

“Do we need the password? Like, do you want to see what Russ wants to hide? Or do you just want a copy, as insurance?”

“ _Can_ you copy it without the password?”

He pulled out his phone and tapped in a search. “I think so? _How to Clone an Encrypted Hard Drive._ Is it an encryption password, or does it just unlock the screen?”

“Is there a difference?” Tara asked. None of us knew for sure.

Donnie frowned. “If _Russ_ was thinking of worst-case scenarios, he’d assume it’s already been copied six times, and the copies scattered around like so many Horcruxes.”

“Like what?” I said, but Tara smiled, and he lit up right back. Lord, spare me.

“That’s the real question,” he went on. “Why the hell does he want this particular laptop so bad?”

“Because it’s his, and he’s pissed off about it,” I said, thinking about my old Glock, and my flashlight too for that matter.

“The email is on there, isn’t it?” Tara said. “If something happened to Owen, and then someone read what Russ and Ernie were talking about...”

“But it still wouldn’t matter if he got _this_ machine back,” said Donnie. “Email’s stored on servers too. That’s why Ernie wanted to get together with Russ to talk, instead of emailing.”

“Does it matter, though?” I asked. “The question is, will he trade? If he will, and we can do it safely, who cares why he wants it? Step one is to call Ace and ask. If he says no deal, I don’t know what else we can do.”

Tara looked unhappy, but I was just stating facts, and I think she knew it.

We decided if they were willing to trade, the safest thing would be to meet somewhere semi-public, outside of Blakeley County, so I didn’t get conveniently pulled over by a deputy before I could get to the meeting place.

“So now…one of us needs to call this asshole,” Donnie grimaced.

“I wouldn’t mind.” I tried not to sound too eager.

“That’s the happiest look I’ve seen on you in ages,” Donnie said dubiously, but he and Tara agreed that I could do it, and she gave me Ace’s number. Tara talked to the guys in the hall, a liquid babble of syllables, and their faces relaxed. I went back out to the car for a bit of privacy.

“Hello?”

That was my boy’s gravelly twang, all right. Just for form’s sake, I asked, “Is this Asa McCall?”

“Yeah.” Suspicious.

“Ace, buddy, it’s Caden Hale,” I said pleasantly. “You didn’t leave me your number the other night. I had to get it from Tara.”

He didn’t say anything immediately. I heard a couple of sounds – if I had to guess, maybe a door closing, and a bit of wind noise. He’d stepped outside.

“What do you want?” he growled.

“Come on, Ace, don’t act stupider than you are. You know exactly what I want. Owen Casey.”

“I got no idea where he’s at.”

“Would it help if I said I know where your boss’s laptop is?”

A pause. “What do you know about it?”

“Does it matter? He wants his laptop back, and I want Owen. I doubt you’ve got authority to deal on your own, so why don’t you go ask him if he’ll let you make a trade?”

“You’re telling me,” he said slowly, “that you want to give us the laptop? If we give you Owen?”

“Is it that hard to understand? Go tell Russ, I’m sure he’ll get it. He went to college and all.”

I could almost hear his teeth grinding. “This a good number to reach you at?”

“Sure.”

He hung up on me.

I went back inside to report to Donnie and Tara. “Step one’s done, but I don’t have an answer yet. He’ll have to talk to Russ, and I don’t know how long that’ll take. In the meantime, we can work on hedging our bets. You think Richard would be pissed if we woke him up?”

Donnie talked me out of calling Richard right then. It didn’t make sense to wait around at Hernandez Motor Services, so we might as well all head for Memphis, and call Richard after we got there.

Yeah, all of us. Tara wasn’t about to let us drive off with the laptop. And where Tara went, the kid went; and where they went, all of her and Owen’s crap went too. That’s why me and my idiot friend Donnie were standing in a parking lot at 1:00 am trying to figure out the right way to secure a baby car seat in the back of a Charger. The less said about that, the better.

I will say, in case you ever need to know: for the really tiny babies, it does go in backwards.

Once we’d had all the fun we could have with that, we got on the road to Memphis. Donnie volunteered to drive, but I needed some road time to calm down, so I said I’d drive until Ace called me, and then we could switch. He napped in the passenger seat while Tara and the baby slept in the back.

Five hours later, we got to Memphis, and my phone hadn’t rung yet.


	7. Chapter 7

I elbowed Donnie awake, and we considered next moves. I was ready to drop, so he told me to go home and sleep. I left him (and Tara, and little Logan, and thankfully all of their stuff) at his place, and went back to the duplex to crash.

I got maybe two and a half hours of sleep before my phone rang.

Being jolted awake sucks, regardless of the circumstances. It’s worse when you wake up knowing you have to be _on_ , immediately. In the four seconds between waking up and answering, I decided that whatever Ace said, I’d tell him I had to make a couple of calls before I agreed to anything. I thumbed the green button and tried not to sound like I’d just woken up.

“Caden Hale.”

“Cade. Russ Reaves.”

It took a couple of seconds for my sleep-fogged brain to reorient. “Russ. I wasn’t expecting to hear from you.”

“I understand you have something of mine.” Smooth as polished stone.

“I may be able to get it,” I said. “I don’t have it now. And I understand you may know how to find something I want.”

“I don’t suppose I could appeal to your better nature?” he said. “Given that it belongs to me, withholding it isn’t that far from being complicit in the theft.”

“Maybe you’re right. Tell you what, I could hand it over to the TBI, and I’m sure they can arrange to get it back to you.”

He sighed. “I’m not going to ask how you happened across it. You may have heard one side of a story. Is that the case?”

God, I was too tired to fence with this guy. “That’s sort of what I do. I listen to people, and I use that to find things.”

“I’d like you to hear the rest of the story before you come to any conclusions. Would you be open to meeting in person?” he asked. “I may be able to offer you what you want, but I’m never comfortable conducting these sorts of discussions over the phone.”

“Where did you have in mind?”

“Are you familiar with Campbell Valley State Park?”

“Yeah. Your family has a place there.”

If he was surprised I knew that, he didn’t let on. “That’s right. I can guarantee we won’t be overheard or recorded there.”

Plan for the worst case. “I’m going to tell someone where I’m going,” I said. “And I’m not going to bring what you want with me.”

He chuckled. “That’s fair. Neither will I.”

~~~

“You’re _going_ there?” Donnie said in disbelief.

I’d called him right after I got off the phone with Russ. “I told him I wasn’t bringing the laptop,” I said patiently. “And I told him I’d tell someone where I was going. Which I am.”

“But why? Dude, that’s _stupid_.”

“Because he wants to negotiate, and he wants to do it in private.”

“I get that’s what _he_ wants. Why the hell did you _agree_?”

“What else was I supposed to do? He wants to deal, and I don’t have a better place to meet. He’s not going to want to drop by the office. I’ll run out there, we’ll hammer out the details, and I can call you to tell you where to bring the laptop. Meet somewhere in the middle. Leave Tara wherever you want, and she can be our ace in the hole.”

“You could have told him _no_ ,” he said. “We already _had_ a plan. All you had to do was tell him where to meet us.”

“For one thing, Russ isn’t going to meet us in a parking lot; it’s going to look like a fucking drug deal, and he’s not going to risk someone with a long lens getting a picture of that. And for another, he said he wants to tell me his side of the story, and I don’t know how long that’s going to take.”

“What the hell could he possibly say that would change anything? And why would you believe him?”

“I don’t have to _believe_ him,” I said. “It’s not going to hurt anything to hear what he has to say.”

“Dude, I don’t care how much you want Owen—”

“Well, _that’s_ obvious.”

Icy silence on the other end of the line.

“Listen,” I said. “I’m going to get there around noon. I can’t see this taking more than an hour. I’ll call you. OK?”

“Fine.”

I had to pace around the duplex for a little while to cool down. Of course Donnie would take Tara’s side. To her, Russ was The Enemy, so sure, he didn’t want me to listen. But Tara’s story was pretty unbelievable, and I wanted to know how Russ’s story would compare. He hadn’t taken me up on the offer to run the laptop through the TBI, though, so I was pretty sure there was _something_ on there he didn’t want seen.

God, what if he had a folder full of kiddie porn on the laptop? I suddenly felt queasy. I didn’t want to wind up abetting _that_ shit. 

I checked the time on my phone. I wanted to shower before I headed over to meet with Mr. Political Smile, but I needed to check in with Richard. Donnie had texted me while I was asleep, letting me know he was putting Tara up in a hotel. I flipped past that to tap out a quick text to Richard.

_You talked to Donnie?_

_He’s over here. Was. He just stomped out. TF did u say to him?_

_Doesn’t matter, he’s just pissed off. You going to copy that thing or hack into it?_

_Both if I can_

_Awesome. Will you make sure there’s not kiddie porn on it? If that’s the problem then I’m going to dropkick this guy into the sun_

_:-| Yeah I’ll check. If I can get in. Gotta charge it some first, it’s flat_

_Thx_

~~~

Out to Blakeley County again. I was starting to hate this drive. Once I got my hands on Owen, I didn’t want to come back here for anything. I’d drive around it if I had to.

I passed the road where I’d turn for Liz’s place – which made me reconsider what I’d just been thinking – and turned at the brown “Campbell Valley State Park” sign. As soon as I passed it, the trees closed in and crowded right up to the road. In a couple of weeks, there would be hints of green, but everything was still winter-brown and gray.

It’s kind of a weird place, for where it is. Tennessee’s got every kind of terrain, from the river flats in the west to the Smoky Mountains in the east. We weren’t that far from Memphis, but the park looked like it belonged closer to the Cumberland area. The rocks weren’t right for that, stacked slate instead of sandstone, but there were hills and ridges and bluffs, and a muddy river that wandered through it all.

To get to the cabins and campgrounds, you cross a bridge to the other side of the river, but I followed Russ’s directions and went on past that sign. The road narrowed, snaking around and up through the trees, past a miniature waterfall and a sign that said _Private – No Trespassing_. Thick dark-green bushes crowded the roadsides, and I crawled around a steep blind curve heading back down toward the river. I was starting to wonder if I’d missed a turn when the Reaves place finally came into view.

Just like when I met Russ at the dealership, I had to stop and recalibrate. I hear “hunting lodge,” especially one built forty or fifty years ago, and I picture a decent-sized cabin. I wasn’t expecting an immaculate two-story log house with a wraparound deck. Three stories, really, since the basement was dug into the slope that went down to the river.

I parked my car in front of the garage – a separate structure to the side, just as solid as the house. One of the three bays had the door rolled up, with a red Grand Chero parked inside, one with a “Trackhawk” badge on the tailgate. Goddamn. I could buy my duplex for less than the price of that car.

I’m used to dealing with skips and the iffy places they hole up in. We’ve pulled skips out of basements, crawl spaces, dumpsters, barns, underpasses, crack houses, you name it. None of those places has ever made me as nervous as Russ’s perfectly clean and tidy lodge.

He came out to meet me wearing a sweater vest and a smile, like we were getting together for drinks. I tried to keep from looking too impressed as he showed me inside, but it was tough. Polished hardwood floors stretched out in front of us, and huge windows opened out on the deck and the river beyond it. Russ was all politeness, asking me if I’d had any trouble finding the place, offering me a glass of water, that kind of thing.

He paused by the kitchen table. “If you don’t mind,” he said apologetically, “I’d like us both to leave our phones here. I want to be completely honest with you, and I’d like you to feel free to do the same.”

I didn’t love the idea, but I couldn’t think of a good reason not to. He took out his own phone and set it on the table, so I put mine down next to it. I could see his point. Phones make good recorders, and some apps are pretty stealthy about it.

He also asked if he could check me with an electronic wand-looking thing, which would make a feedback noise if it picked up a microphone.

“Sure, go for it,” I said. “As long as it’s not a metal detector, because I’ll tell you now, I carry whether I’m on a job or not. No offense.”

“None taken,” he said, running the wand around me. “I usually do too, when I’m not at home or here.”

I asked him what he carried, just professional curiosity, and he said he had a Wilson 1911. I don’t think my eyebrows went up too noticeably. You can get six or eight Glocks for the price of a Wilson. He finished checking me with the wand, and then ran it over himself with a smile.

With that settled, he invited me into a room off to one side of the huge windowed room, a little library with fancy books filling shelves along the walls. The leather chairs we settled into were probably comfortable for someone relaxed enough to enjoy them.

“I meant it when I promised you honesty,” Russ said. “I’m taking a bit of a gamble here. Your employer has a good reputation, as these things go. Everyone speaks well of his character. I’m sure he wouldn’t have hired you if you weren’t up to his standards.”

I tried not to think about how fast my employer would fire my ass if he knew I was here. How would Russ know multiple people who knew Hank? Maybe he meant people in his brother’s circle. “I’m here to listen, Russ, and to make a deal with you, so we both get what we want.”

“I hope so. Let me begin by saying, yes, I know where Owen Casey is. When he was apprehended, he didn’t have the laptop that he and Tara stole from me. Therefore, I assume Tara had it. Since you now have access to it, I assume you’ve talked to her.”

“Those are safe assumptions,” I said.

“As Tara might have told you, at the dealership I manage, we sometimes acquire our parts inventory from unorthodox sources.”

 _Unorthodox sources_. Spare me from pretentious overeducated twits. “What she said was, you run your own chop shop. Now that sounded pretty unbelievable, so—”

“That’s correct.”

“It’s…correct?” Whatever he said about honesty, I hadn’t expected him to come out and straight admit it.

“Yes. She told you the truth. Did she tell you why?”

“Why you run a chop shop? To make money, would be my guess.”

He smiled patiently. “Essentially, yes. But take it a step further. Why make money?”

“To keep a roof over your head and food on the table.”

“True. Money gives you the freedom to take care of yourself, instead of relying on the charity of other people. Once that’s covered, what do you do with extra money?”

“Buy nicer stuff, I guess. Bank some for the future.”

“Definitely. And after that?”

I shrugged. “I’ve never had that much.”

“If you won the lottery; if you checked the numbers and found out you were taking home a few million from Powerball, what would you do with it?”

I’d played the what-if game with friends before. “Pay off my parents’ house, I guess. Buy some cool stuff for my friends.”

“Exactly. You’d take care of the people who are important to you. You and I have the same instinct, but my net is cast a little wider. You see, my family’s lived in this county for generations. It’s been very good to us. Because of that, I have a responsibility to give back, to take care of my community. As I told Hank at the dealership, ‘family’ encompasses more than only blood relations. If I have the _ability_ to help people in my community, that means I have the _duty_ to help.”

“I’m following you so far,” I said, “though I’m interested to hear how you get from that to grand theft auto.”

He smiled at my skeptical tone. “If a businessman in Knoxville walks outside and finds that someone’s driven off with his Range Rover…who’s hurt by that?”

“Other than the owner, you mean?”

“Is the owner hurt? If he’s got a late model Range Rover, I guarantee you he’s got insurance. That’s a guy who has enough extra money to buy some nice toys. It’ll take a little while for the insurance company to confirm it’s gone for good, but our Range Rover owner can probably afford a rental for few weeks. If he’s impatient, he might buy a replacement before the reimbursement check arrives. He may be inconvenienced, but he’s not hurt.”

“How about the rest of us folks who have to pay higher insurance because of that?” I was pretty sure I’d heard that’s how it worked.

“It won’t affect you personally. The actuaries will run the numbers, and they might raise the premiums on Range Rovers, or Knoxville residents. To the insurance company, it’s just one more for the “claims paid” file, and their executives and large investors might get a smaller check at the end of the year. Now, this is just my opinion, but I don’t think a billionaire like Warren Buffett will notice or care if his income goes down by a tenth of a percent.

“Back here in Blakeley though...this county isn’t wealthy. It never has been. We don’t have much arable land to farm; we don’t have easy highway access to attract manufacturing; we don’t have a Nashville to bring in tourists. It’s a place where changing someone’s income by a relatively small amount can make a massive difference in their quality of life.

“If I can raise a mechanic’s salary by a thousand dollars, what’s he going to do with that money? Just like you said, he buys housing, and food, and clothing. He’ll buy most of it from local providers. Now those merchants have more money, and they can hire more people for their businesses. They buy bigger houses; they pay more in property tax; the county has more money to build better schools. It cascades.”

No amount of good intentions was going to make what he was doing legal, but he was so damn sincere about it. Stealing is wrong, no question, but if you’re weighing a whole lot of right against one simple wrong…I could see the temptation.

“It sounds like you’re telling me you run a chop shop because that lets you funnel more cash to Blakeley County,” I said. “So that means something about the laptop – and I don’t really care what – would blow up your operation.”

“That’s correct. I’m not saying what I’m doing is right. I’m saying if I don’t do it, more people would be hurt than just me.”

How much did this “lodge” cost in upkeep every year? It wasn’t my problem, really. It was a Blakeley County issue. And if there was something unforgivable on the laptop, Richard would tell me before I had to hand it over.

“I can get you your laptop back,” I said, “but I want Owen. I’m sure you know, he’s got a federal warrant out. Tara said the Blakeley warrant was an…unorthodox one, so you probably don’t want the feds looking too closely at that casefile. If you give him to me, I’ll hand him directly to the feds, and they’ll send him to Kentucky or Kansas. We’ll both be done with him.”

“You are determined, aren’t you?” Russ said with a faint smile. “I know some of what happened in North Carolina. Is that the reason? It’s personal?”

“Unfinished business,” I said.

“I can understand that,” he said. “It’s personal for me too. We both want him to get what he deserves. When I ask you to leave Owen in my hands, I’m asking for a lot, I realize that. And then I have the gall to ask you to return my property as well. If I was in your shoes, I’d be asking, _What’s in this for me, Russ?_

“I’ll tell you this: we don’t have any investigators like you in Blakeley County. My brother is the county sheriff, and he’s complained to me that he lacks the resources to hunt down fugitives. Have you ever considered working independently? Either instead of, or in addition to your Memphis work. It could be very lucrative.”

I kept my face as blank as I could. For fuck’s sake, he thought he could just buy me off?

“That’s an interesting offer,” I said. “But then you’d have Owen in the Irvine lockup, using up your county tax dollars, without much point, right? The federal case is still going to take precedence over the local one. Now, Owen can talk all he wants about conspiracies and chop shops, but it’s a crazy story. If he’s in Irvine, the feds might check around a little, as long as he’s here; but if he’s in Memphis, I can’t see them bothering. It’s less risky for you if y’all don’t cross paths with the feds at all.

“Look, you want your laptop back. I want Owen. There’s a Walmart twenty minutes west of here, in Jasper. If you send Ace there with Owen, I’ll meet him in the parking lot with the laptop, and we can trade. Couldn’t be simpler.”

“I’d still be looking at a substantial risk,” he said. “What he and Tara know could be very damaging to me and my family.”

“Who’s going to believe them? I’m sure you’ve taken steps to protect yourself in the last few months. Whatever proof is on that laptop, you’ll have it back. And as for me…I don’t care. This isn’t my county. And like you said, you’re not hurting anyone.”

He thought about it for a minute, and finally nodded, almost to himself. “I suppose you’re right. The Walmart in Jasper?”

“Right. I’ll need to get the laptop first. It’s what, 12:30? Tell Ace I’ll meet him there at 3:00. We can both be done with the whole mess.”

He put his hand out, and we shook on the deal, like I was buying a car.

That was that, as far as he and I were concerned. The only thing I was worried about was whether Richard would have enough time to hack the laptop.

Russ and I walked out of the library into the lodge’s main room, and I stopped short to avoid running into someone standing there. I had about half a second to get an impression of a dark blue windbreaker, super-short buzzed hair, and hard eyes, before the room whirled and I hit the wall.

I honestly think Russ was almost as shocked as I was. “Ernie! What—”

Don’t fight with cops if you can help it; they’re used to it and they’ve got training. I know that, but...see, my problem is, your average skip only starts a fight if they’re desperate, crazy, or high. So when someone goes hands-on with me, I react hard.

He had hold of my right arm, so I shoved off the wall, throwing all my weight straight back at him. Solid fucker; he barely moved, and just rammed me forward again. I turned my head to the side barely in time to keep from face-planting into the wall. And then everything whirled again, the hardwood floor came rushing toward me, and I barely missed face-planting into _that_. He barked something, and two more guys crashed into us.

Ernie and Russ argued overhead while the two goons pinned me down. I made them work for it, at least, until one of them cranked my left arm back. I almost turned inside out. The jolt went all the way from my fingertips to my eyes. One of them scooped my car keys out of my pocket and tossed them to Ernie, then found the snaps that secured my holster and took that off me too.

“He didn’t bring it _with_ him.” Russ sounded like he was barely keeping himself from going off on his brother. “He was about to go _get_ it. Why couldn’t you just track him with the GPS beacon?”

“If it’s in Memphis, it’s not in my jurisdiction.”

“But—”

“Russ. I’ve got this. I’ll handle it.” Ice cold. He had to be the only one who could take that tone with Russ Reaves.

“If he doesn’t have it, we have no idea who does!”

“It’ll be someone he’s talked to recently.”

The two goons hauled me up to my knees. Ernie picked my phone up off the table, which is when I realized the damn thing would unlock when it recognized me.

I tried to wrench myself to the side, maybe get them off balance, but they had me pinned between them. I knew what they were doing; we use the same damn tactics on rowdy skips because they _work_. Ernie went to grab my chin, and I was mad enough to try to bite him.

His hand moved so fast it blurred. My head snapped sideways, and my ear rang like a bell. He’d straight backhanded me, and it rattled me enough that I could hardly react when he yanked my head up. My eyes focused just in time to recognize my phone’s rectangular screen before it registered me, and the little lock symbol swung open.

Ernie walked away and started going through my phone while his two goons dragged me over to the basement stairs. I tried to kick – them, the wall, I didn’t care – but they’d figured me out by then, and just gave my arm an extra bit of torque. I managed not to scream. My heels hit every damn step as I told them exactly what I thought of them, their mothers, their sisters, and the fleas they all shared.

Downstairs, there was a four-inch metal support pole next to the stairs, and one of them held me there while the other cuffed my hands behind it. “You need to understand, buddy boy,” sneered the one in front of me. “You mess with one Reaves, you’ve messed with the whole family.”

“Yeah, I know,” I fired back. “That’s how it works when your family tree’s a damn Christmas wreath.”

Of course that got me a split lip. Worth it, if you ask me. They stomped back up the stairs while I recovered from that, and a thin little laugh came from my right.

Owen was on the floor four feet away from me.


	8. Chapter 8

I didn’t even believe it at first. It was too much to deal with that too. How could I care about Owen when I was trying to remember exactly what Donnie had texted me about Tara, and what I’d said to Richard about the laptop?

One more ounce of provocation, and I might have ripped my own arms out of their sockets, like the animals that chew their legs off to get out of traps. Donnie had been right. He’d been right, and now the Reaves would be after him, and it was my fault. Because I was so damn intent on catching the asshole who was now _right next to me_. Too close for comfort, but not close enough for me to kick in the face.

He levered himself up a little to look at me. Bruises added uneven shadows to the tattoos on his arms, and one wrist was cuffed to a stair support. The other hand was tucked in against his chest, black and blue and swollen. His lower lip was cracked and bloody, almost exactly like the last time I’d seen him. That had been my fault, back then; my one victory that whole night.

I thought I should feel glad that he’d gotten his ass beat, and I wasn’t sure why I didn’t.

I’d imagined what it would be like to confront Owen again, face to face, how that would go. He’d gotten bigger and meaner in my mind, this unstoppable force. And now here he was, and it didn’t even make sense. I didn’t care about him.

I was more concerned about the fact that the little key I had for situations like this wasn’t going to do me a damn bit of good, because the fucker who’d cuffed me knew what he was doing. One of Ernie’s deputies, most likely.

Dust tickled my throat, and I looked around to try to get my bearings. It was like any old basement – full of cardboard boxes, old furniture, and spiderwebs. A couple of bare bulbs hung overhead, unlit, but weak light filtered in from a high window in a far corner, and through the dirty panes set into the door on the opposite wall.

I looked down at Owen again. He was still there. 

What do you say in a situation like that? _Hey, how’s it going_ seems a little out of place.

He cleared his throat and went with a raspy, “What the fuck are you doing here?” He had bruises around his neck too.

“Looking for you.”

His mouth twitched like he wanted to laugh. “You’re one hell of a tracker. I surrender.”

Even here, he had the exact same goddamn attitude. Just a smartass fucker that wanted to find your buttons and push them. “What the hell have you gotten yourself into?”

“Some shit.”

“Well, that’s a little obvious, isn’t it?”

“Don’t get pissed off at me,” he said. “Ain’t my fault you’re a damn liar.” 

“The fuck do you mean by that?”

“I seem to recall you saying you weren’t going to come after me again.”

I started to answer, but I stopped. Honestly, he was right. I’d told him that every other bounty hunter in the South would come after him, even if I didn’t.

He saw the look on my face and coughed up a tiny laugh. “So why did you, then?”

“I wanted to send you a Christmas card, and I didn’t have your address.”

“Good luck with that. At this rate, I ain’t going to make it to Easter, much less Christmas.”

I thought that was more of his smartass mouth. I really did. “What, they’re that mad about that computer you stole?”

“Yeah. Russ tell you about that?”

“Tara told me.”

“Did you pick her up?” The attitude disappeared, just like that, and his breath hitched. “You didn’t take her in, did you?”

“No. I talked to her, down in Dalton. She’s fine.”

He sagged back against the stair support. “God, don’t scare me like that.”

Hell of a thing for him to say to me.

I twisted my wrists to see if I could rotate them inside the cuffs. If I could get one facing in, instead of out, I could turn myself loose in about ten seconds…but it wasn’t going to happen. They were tight enough to hurt, though not enough to cut off circulation. The way they’re supposed to be. Goddammit. I gave up and sat down on the floor.

What the hell were they planning to do with me? Hang onto me until they could get their hands on the laptop, apparently.

If I remembered the texts right, Ernie and Russ would know Donnie’d had it, but he’d given it to Richard. They wouldn’t have Richard’s address, or even his last name. He was in my contact list as “Richard.”

They’d know we didn’t have the password, but Richard was trying to hack it. They’d know Tara was with us, and Donnie had put her up in a hotel. He hadn’t told me which one.

Would Richard be at the office? Probably not; he wouldn’t want to explain what he was working on, if Hank was there. So the laptop was at Richard’s house. I knew he lived with a couple of roommates, but I didn’t know where. 

So Ernie’s goons would have to find Donnie and follow him, shadowing a target who knew what surveillance looked like, until he met up with Richard. But that could take hours, and by the time they got to Memphis, Donnie would already be wondering what had happened to me. 

“Where’s Tara at now? Still in Dalton?” Owen asked.

“No,” I said shortly. “She came up to Memphis with us.”

“Why?”

“Why the fuck should I talk to you?”

“Cause you ain’t got nothing better to do, far as I can see.”

I didn’t answer him.

“Would it help if I said I was sorry?”

I’m surprised I didn’t straight lose my mind, right then and there. He was lucky I couldn’t get to him. Russ would’ve had to mop him off the floor. “Do _not_ ,” I managed to choke out, “fucking apologize to me.”

“See, I thought you were one of Russ’s boys.”

“Shut _up_ ,” I said, but I couldn’t stop myself from going on, “You _remembered_ me. You knew I wasn’t some asshole pretending to be a bounty hunter.”

“Well, yeah, but you still could have been working for him. He’s got everybody else’s number. Cops, prosecutors, judges…why not some bounty hunters too? That was a swanky cabin for a bunch like y’all.”

The cabin. I didn’t want to ask. I didn’t want to need the answer like I did. I tried to tell myself it didn’t matter. But...he was here in front of me, and I’d probably never have another chance. “How the hell did you find that place, anyway?”

The corner of his mouth lifted up. “That been bugging you?”

“No. We never did figure it out, so I just wondered.”

“In other words, it’s been bugging you.”

“Nevermind.” I knew I shouldn’t have asked.

“If you got to know, Tara’s mama don’t like me much, but I get along with her brother.”

I thought back. There’d been a teenager at the trailer, but he hung around behind his mama and didn’t give off any threat vibes, so I’d ignored him. “The skinny kid?”

“Yeah, that’s Cody, he’s older ‘n he looks. He called me after y’all left with Tara. He heard y’all talking about a cabin, and someone said the name of the road it was on, so I Googled it, and Cody drove us up there. The first cabin we passed had kids’ toys in front, so that wasn’t it. The second one had four cars in the driveway, but none of ‘em was an F-150 or a Tahoe, and I didn’t think y’all would’ve brought _that_ many guys. The last one didn’t have anyone at home, so I broke a window on the side and climbed in. And there was four duffels, so it had to be y’all. I told Cody to get back home and I’d call him if I needed him again.”

I’d known about the broken window. Alex and Donnie had found it when they went back to get our stuff and clean up. That told us how he’d gotten inside, but we’d never known how he found it in the first place, or gotten there without a car. That’s why it bothered me so much. If I didn’t know how he did it, who was to say he couldn’t do it again? But it turned out to be so simple.

“You just hid out and waited to see who came back? What would you have done if we all came back there together?”

“Hell if I know,” he said, leaning his head back and closing his eyes.

“You never had any plan at all, did you?”

“My _plan_ was to keep me and Tara from coming back to this county. That’s all we wanted. If Russ hadn’t came after us, we might’ve chucked the damn laptop in a river someday. We were doing a good job of settling down in Dalton. I didn’t think – well, it don’t matter now. I just hope Tara finds a better place to hide. I don’t care what happens to me, as long as she’s OK.”

“That’s real noble of you,” I said. “How’s she supposed to take care of that baby and make enough to live on while you’re in jail?”

“Jail?” He opened his eyes to give me a sideways look, like something was funny. “I ain’t going to see the inside of a jail.”

“Even if the Blakeley warrant was bullshit, you realize you’re looking at federal time now,” I told him. “And there was _no fucking reason_ for all that. The only thing you had to do was tell someone what was going on. The TBI investigates sheriffs all the time.”

“Like they’d believe me,” he said. “They’re still cops. Cops protect cops.”

“Look, your sheriff might be running a dirty shop, but all cops aren’t like that.”

“Not to _you_ they aren’t.”

“If you don’t want to be treated like a criminal, then don’t break the law. I deal with cops all the time, and most of them are decent people. I would have been a cop, if I hadn’t decided to do something else.”

He scowled at the wall. I tried again to get a hand turned the right way inside the cuff, but I didn’t have any more luck than before. I would’ve had to break a wrist bone.

“Why?” he asked.

“Why what?”

“Why are you a bounty hunter and not a cop?”

“Why do you care?”

“You embarrassed about it?”

“No, I just don’t know why you care.” I swear, Owen Casey is the most irritating person on the face of the planet. “I was going to Southwest for the Criminal Justice program, and I met a guy there who knew Hank. That guy introduced us, and we talked about what the fugitive recovery biz was like. I ended up working for him. That’s all.”

“College, huh? Lucky you, being able to afford that shit.”

“That’s what _loans_ are for. No reason you couldn’t have gotten one.”

“College loans don’t feed your family, dumbass. My mama was on disability, and her little check and my shit job was all that kept us from being homeless.”

“Are you going to tell me that’s why you decided to start stealing cars?” Another skip, another excuse. Never their fault.

“I didn’t just _decide_ to steal cars,” he said disgustedly.

“Oh, you magically happened to find yourself in someone else’s car one day?”

“You want to know?”

“No, not really.”

“So back then, there wasn’t nothing to do on weekends around here but go down to Torlan and watch people throw their cars down the quarter-mile, OK? The regulars used to get together to show off the mods they’d made under the hood. So I bugged the shit out of people—"

“I believe _that_.”

“Shut up. I bugged everybody until I figured out which ones didn’t mind explaining how it all worked. This one guy, Dave, he was awesome. Taught me a lot, and he’d tip me for helping him work on his car. Told me he worked for the big dealership in Irvine.

“One night, he asked if I had time to drive up to Ballatin with him the next day. He said he was buying a car from a friend, and needed somebody to help him pick it up. He said he’d give me a hundred dollars, cash.

“And once I saw that car, and the guy he was buying it from, I was pretty sure it was hot. But I kept my fuckin’ mouth shut, because _a hundred dollars_ , man. For two hours of driving.”

“And you were dying for new sneakers, I’ll bet.”

“I _didn’t_ —”

The floor joists creaked overhead, and we both glanced up, but whoever it was kept walking.

He went on, quieter but just as intense, “You ain’t never been poor, have you? I gave that hundred dollars to the fucking electric company, so we wouldn’t get our power shut off.”

“You know, we got a hell of a lot of poor people in this state,” I shot back, “and they don’t all break the law to get by.”

“I _know_ that. That ain’t the point. You met a guy who knew a guy, and that’s why you do what you do. Well, I met a guy too, just his line of work wasn’t as legal.”

I didn’t bother responding to that. The second-most frustrating thing about being cuffed to that pole was not being able to add to Owen’s bruises. I didn’t care about his life. We all make choices, and he’d made his, and that’s why we were locked in a basement now. Sure, I’d made the choice to go after him again, but I wouldn’t have had to, if I wasn’t so fucked up from the first time.

It sounded like a skip’s excuse. _I wouldn’t have had to if…_

I didn’t want to think about that. The important thing was to find a way out, so I could get in touch with Donnie. That idiot would be out there trying to protect Tara, and she wasn’t even his girl.

I had a key, but no way to use it. Owen had one hand free, but even if I trusted him enough to give him my key, he might not be able to pick it up. The fingers were swollen and curled in on themselves.

“What happened to your hand?” I asked.

He didn’t answer immediately, but finally he swallowed and said, “Stomped on. A few times.”

Christ. “Ace?”

“Ernie.”

That threw me a little. Something wasn’t adding up. Cops can go too far, in the heat of a fight, but that’s understandable once you’ve been in a few of those situations yourself. I broke a guy’s nose once. I didn’t mean to, but he tried to choke me out, and…well, I won, and he went to the hospital.

What Owen was talking about wasn’t that. Deliberately, purposefully breaking a guy’s hand amounted to straight up torture. If they put Owen in jail, with the usual paperwork, the feds would want to talk to him. A few bruises wouldn’t raise any eyebrows, but an injury like Owen had would generate some serious questions.

Which seemed like...maybe they weren’t planning to have Owen talk to the feds. He’d just told me he wouldn’t see the inside of a jail.

Maybe the Reaves weren’t planning on having Owen talk to anyone, ever.

“What the hell is on that laptop?” I said.

That thin laugh again. “It don’t matter.”

“Dammit, what do you care if I know or not?” I said. “It’s not going to make much of a difference at this point.”

He looked over at me with a hint of his old one-sided smirk. “You still don’t know shit. If I say ‘it don’t matter,’ it’s because _it don’t matter_.”

“Well, you could quit being such a smug fucking asshole and tell me what _does_ matter,” I shot back. It was getting harder to keep my voice down.

“Also,” he said, “you need to learn when to shut up, because that’s the whole reason I kicked your ass in the first place, and it’s why Russ’s cousins are going to laugh when they shoot you.”

I was so pissed off. Still...the taste of blood in my mouth reminded me that he might have a point. And I didn’t like how matter-of-fact he was about the cousins and me.

“Fine,” I said. “I don’t know shit. Why don’t you educate me? If Russ’s cousins are going to shoot me, then I _would_ like to know why, and you’re the only one who can tell me right now.”

He hesitated. “You sure? I ain’t kidding about not making it to Easter.” 

The floor joists creaked above my head again as someone crossed the room. “Those assholes up there will probably assume you told me, so I might as well know.”

“I guess. So that laptop – if you sent it to the TBI, what are they going to look at?”

“A blank screen, unless they can figure out the password,” I said.

“It’s the TBI, they’ll crack the password, but that ain’t the point. The _first_ thing they’ll look at is the serial number on the bottom. They’ll plug that number into their system, and it’ll come back stolen.”

“Of course it’ll—”

“Shut up for a damn minute, will you? Russ never reported it stolen. That number’ll match a laptop that went missing a couple years ago. Belonged to an insurance adjuster. That was his work computer.”

I tried to make sense of that. “So why did Russ have it?”

“That’s the question he don’t want anyone to ask. That’s why it don’t matter what’s on it. He could have nothing but Sunday School lessons on it, and they’d still want to know how he ended up with a dead guy’s property.”

“A – did you say a _dead_ guy?” 

“Yeah. Real mystery. Just moved here, had no idea what he was getting into. I only met him once, when I was heading into work one day, and he stopped me to ask if I’d mind talking to him about some of the repairs we did. I told him not right then, because I had to clock in. Then Russ told me not to talk to him. Two days later, _bam_. Found next to his car with a hole in his head, and a gun on the ground behind him. No fingerprints on it, no clues. One for the unsolved file.”

“No,” I said. “Just…no. You can’t convince me that Russ Reaves went out and—”

“No, not Russ. He wouldn’t get his hands dirty like that. Look, if you were driving home in the dark, in a place you didn’t know real well, what would make you pull over and stop in the middle of nowhere?”

I wouldn’t, if I could help it. “Car trouble?”

“Not him, his car was fine. How about if you saw blue lights in your rear view?”

“You think a _cop_ shot him?”

“I ain’t talking about some random deputy.”

“Come _on_ ,” I said. “I’m still not buying this. It doesn’t make sense. A sheriff’s going to know better than to hang on to a dead guy’s stuff.”

“Sure. That’s why he told Russ to take it to C.J.’s junkyard and throw it in the car shredder. But Russ likes expensive shit, and he figured as long as he had his IT guy wipe the thing clean, it’d be fine. Just like a brand new computer. I guarantee you he never thought it might walk out of the office someday.”

I couldn’t think of any other arguments, though I tried. If I believed what he was telling me, I might have to come to grips with how fucked I was.

If that laptop was what Owen said it was, the problem wasn’t that it would blow up Russ’s operation. The problem was that the county sheriff, cousin of the county mayor, had shot a guy in cold blood to protect his brother’s auto theft ring, and Tara had the only evidence.

Tennessee’s a death penalty state, but they can only execute you once. If a guy’s committed one murder, he’s not risking anything more on the next one, or the next. If Ernie had shot that guy, it only made sense that he’d be willing to off Owen and me, if that would keep his secret.

He didn’t know Owen had tried to protect Tara by not telling her everything. He’d assume she was just as much of a liability.

Everything she knew, Donnie knew.

I felt like the basement was running out of air. This was worse than North Carolina. Hank had known what he was doing. He’d volunteered to walk into danger for me. Donnie didn’t have a clue Ernie’s goons were coming for him.

Hank said it was his job to keep his crew safe, but it was everyone’s job. We all looked out for each other. Donnie had told me not to come here, and I refused to listen. Hank had told me not to go to Georgia, and I snuck off anyway. I’d said all the right things about not getting involved, but the plain truth was, I wanted to be the one to find Owen. I wanted him to realize he should never have tangled with me.

Tara’s story had bothered me more than it should have. It was hard enough, coming to terms with everything that had happened in North Carolina, and to find out that it was all because of a _mistake_? That none of it would have happened if Owen or I had asked the right questions at the right time?

I should have told Tara we couldn’t help her. I should have told the TBI, and let someone official handle it. Donnie had been right about that too.

Outside the door, bare branches drew dark spiky shadows across the cloudy glass panes. If Owen was right, and Ernie was planning to just shoot us and have done with it, they wouldn’t do it here in the basement. They’d want to drag us outside at least. I might have one last chance to fight my way free.

I wasn’t sure if I cared enough to try. Maybe when Russ’s cousins came for me, I should thank them for putting me out of my misery. The person I was a year ago, the person I remembered being, was already dead. He was never coming back.

Owen moved restlessly, leaning his head against the stairs and closing his eyes again. Smartass attitude or not, he was hurting. Some part of me should have been gloating over that, but I still couldn’t find it. He didn’t matter. My stupid broken self didn't matter either.

The only thing that mattered was finding a way to get out of here and call Donnie. Donnie could get in touch with Tara and Richard to warn them.

Those three ought to be the only ones in danger. Ernie couldn’t be desperate enough to check on all of my contacts, could he? I thought about the rest of my team, and how much he might think they knew. I thought about Liz, the only Blakeley County name in my contact list. How many fingers was Ernie willing to break to get what he wanted?

I heard myself say, “Can you use that hand at all?”

“For what?” Owen asked listlessly.

“Getting out of here.”

He opened his eyes to see if I was serious. “Well, that would be great, but they forgot to leave us a key to these.” He clanked his cuff against the stairs.

“Be _quiet_ , dammit. If you had one, could you use it?”

He stared at me, then looked down at his hand. His fingers twitched, all together, which made him flinch and go a little paler. He cussed through clenched teeth, and tried again, moving one finger at a time. It didn’t look comfortable. “Maybe,” he said, strained but quieter. “Why, you got one in your pocket?”

“If we went out that door…what’s the fastest way out of this park? Jump in the river?”

“I wouldn’t. It zigs and zags all over the place. I’d probably head east toward the highway. Follow it south, stay out of sight until the county line.”

“You think we could get through all the trees and shit?”

" _We,_ " he said. “If you could get out of here, why wouldn’t you just go?”

Of course he’d be difficult about it. “Because you may be an asshole, but Russ is a bigger asshole, and it’ll really fuck him up if we’re both gone.”

He didn’t look convinced.

“And I’m going to need your help,” I admitted.

“See, that makes more sense. That door ain’t going to work, though. Deadbolt.”

I squinted across the dim room. He was right, it was the kind that’s keyed on both sides. “I guess they don’t have a key stashed anywhere down here.” 

“Doubt it. Window, maybe?”

The window was up near the ceiling, a lot wider than it was tall, with two dirty panes. “Does it open?”

“Hell if I know.” He studied me. “You’re serious. You want to break out.”

“We’re sure as hell going to try. Ready?”

“Right now?”

“The longer we wait, the more likely it is they’ll come check on us.”

“…Yeah. Go for it.” 

“Alright. Now don’t you laugh at me, or I _will_ leave you here.” I scooted sideways and wiggled around until I could get one hand into the back of my waistband. It was tricky with the pole in the way. I had to lean and reach, and my shoulder wanted to know what the hell I thought I was doing, but I finally got my fingers on what I wanted and pulled it out.

His eyes widened and he sat straight up. “You got a fuckin’ holdout key?”

“Yeah, and it’s your fault. I used to think guys who carried these were paranoid.” I set it on the floor and moved around until I could get my foot on it to slide it over to him.

It took him two tries to pick it up, and more than that to make it work. His hands were shaking, from pain or nerves, and it was pure luck that they both twitched the right way at the right time, and the key sank into the keyhole. He switched to a different awkward grip to turn it, and got the spring compressed just enough for the ratchet teeth to swing free.

I’d wondered if he might decide to run off without me, but he didn’t hesitate, just turned me loose as quick as he could. We slunk over to the window to take a look at it.

It looked like it should open, and it was big enough to get through, if a little high off the floor. Owen pointed to a dusty old chair tucked into a corner. I pulled it out of the spiderwebs, carried it over and climbed up.

The window still looked promising, but all I could see of the outside was a short retaining wall a couple of feet away. If someone was having a smoke in the back yard, I wouldn’t see them until I was halfway out the window.

Not a fixable problem. I pushed the spring latch on the right-hand pane and tugged sideways.

It slid about four inches, with a grinding scrape.

I don’t know about Owen, but my heart thumped hard enough to hurt. Neither of us moved an inch; we just listened.

The floor joists above us creaked, but no more than they had earlier. I remembered that breathing was a good idea. Wouldn’t get far without that.

I tugged on the pane again. It kept going, and kept scraping. I moved it an inch at a time, keeping my ears stretched for footsteps, voices, anything that might mean someone was curious about the little crunchy noises from downstairs. Owen vibrated in place, glancing back at the stairs every few seconds. I pushed until it wouldn’t go any further.

Good thing I’d gotten skinny. I slipped through the window easy as an otter diving into a river. It was tougher for Owen, only using one hand, but he made it through.

You’d think being outside would be a relief, but it was almost worse. In the basement, there was only one direction Russ’s people could come at us. Outside, they could be anywhere. They could be looking out any window. We could take three steps and hear someone start yelling.

Owen bumped my shoulder and pointed off to the east. I made myself move, creeping along the base of the wall, and leaned my head around the corner of the cabin. No one around. The window closest to me had the blinds closed. We’d have to hope they were all like that.

I turned back to Owen and whispered, “Ready?”

He nodded.

I counted to three and we sprinted for the trees.


	9. Chapter 9

I’ve hiked through woods before, but that’s _walking_ , and usually on trails. Uncontrolled forest is something else.

In forest like that, nobody chainsaws the trees that fall down. When a tree dies, it lands on the ground and rots there. You can’t push your way through an entire treetop, even a dead half-rotted one. Try to go around? There’s another just past it.

We were trying to move fast, but we kept tripping over broken branches and stepping in holes hidden under the fallen leaves. Briar vines tangled around my feet, this nasty shit like living barbed wire, the same color as the ground. I jumped over a patch of them, tripped, threw my hands out to catch myself, and landed on more. I could have set the whole damn forest on fire with the words that came out of my mouth.

“You gotta be quieter,” Owen said, while I picked myself up.

“Who’s out here other than us? If they’re after us already, we’re fucked regardless.”

“You can’t go two minutes without running your mouth, can you? Is it ‘cause you’re a city boy?”

“I’m from _Memphis_.”

“Like I said.” He looked around. “Be faster if we could find a game trail.”

“Do we want to be on a trail? I’d expect they’d look there first.” 

“Once they start looking, maybe. But ‘til then, we want to get as far as we can, fast as we can.”

“With my luck, they’ll bring out a bunch of damn hunting dogs and it won’t make a difference,” I said.

“They might. But first they’ll have to call up whatever toothless motherfucker owns the dogs, and he’ll have to load ‘em into his truck and drive out here. The more of a head start we get, the better.” 

I looked at him to see if he was serious. “I was kidding about that.”

“I’m not. Let’s go.”

Letting Owen Casey lead me through the woods was not how I planned to spend this day, or any day, but I followed him down a slope to where a little stream trickled through. He pointed out two-pronged prints in the silty mud, and a narrow path that led away from the stream. “This goes…” He squinted upwards, but the sun was behind the clouds. “…southeast, I think. For now. We’ll have to see if it keeps heading where we want.”

“Are we going to be in the woods the whole way, or are there roads?”

“We don’t want to be on roads, that’s just asking to be found.”

“Do I look like an idiot to you? No, don’t answer that,” I said, as a hint of a grin slid across his face. “I want to know if we have to _cross_ any roads.”

“A couple.” He drew a few lines in the mud. “If the park’s this shape, and we’re about here, we want to pick up the highway over here.” He added a straight line for the north-south road. “Stay on this side of it, in the woods, until we get into Coster County. We can argue about where to go after that.”

“But to get there…”

He frowned at the mud and drew a few more tentative lines. “We gotta cross the driveway that goes to the house. And I think there’s a gravel road here, and the paved road that links up to the highway here.”

The narrow trail climbed the slope, crossed the driveway, and continued up the ridge. Owen and I paused below the road, but we didn’t hear anything, so we zipped across and ducked right back under the trees. From there, the trail headed north, so we turned east and fought our way through the woods for a stretch.

“How long’ll it take us to get to Coster County?” I asked.

“Few hours.”

“Yeah, I figured, but how many is a few?”

He picked up a stick and pushed a mess of briar vines out of the way. “Why, you got an appointment?” The vines sprang back at me as he passed.

I could have cussed him out, but that wouldn’t have gotten my question answered. “Because Ernie’s after my friends. If Donnie and Richard get picked up, Tara might be next. I need to get in touch with them before that happens.”

He turned around to see if I was serious. When he answered, for once there was no attitude in his voice. “Depends how many trails and paths we can find. If we’re lucky, three hours. If we’re fighting our way through these sticker-vines the whole way, six or more.”

Ugh. “It’ll be dark by then.”

“They took your flashlight?”

“No,” I said icily. “You did, remember?”

“You didn’t get another one?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

Lucky for me he was on the other side of the briar patch. It wasn’t the best time to break my knuckles on his face. “Because I haven’t found one that’ll fit in my mag carrier and isn’t stupid expensive, considering I _also_ had to buy a new gun. Any more questions?”

He shrugged, turned around and moved off. I picked up a stick of my own, moved the briar vines, and followed him.

Trees, leaves, vines, rocks, and mud. Once we saw a pair of deer startle and run off. Owen said under his breath, “God, that’s a nice doe.”

“Nice?”

“Shoot one like that in December, you’ve got venison in the freezer for a while.”

“What do you do with venison?”

“Eat it.” He was facing away from me, but I could hear the smirk in his voice.

“You’re an annoying little shit, you know that?”

“Yeah.”

Fucker wouldn’t even turn around and swing at me when I gave him the perfect opportunity. Selfish, that’s what he was.

We walked in silence for another good long while, until he waved me to a stop. “Gravel road,” he said in a bare whisper. “If I was lookin’ for us, I’d set some folks along there.”

We crept up to where we could see the road through the trees. All I could hear was birds and wind. I took a step closer, but Owen flipped a hand at me.

A cloud of blackbirds lifted up from a tree, screeching and yelling, as a white SUV with a lightbar came around a bend in the road.

I hadn’t been planning on hiding in the woods when I got dressed that morning. My shirt was a light shade of tan, too light to blend in, and blue jeans aren’t a color you’ll ever see in nature. Owen’s dirty white T-shirt might as well have been a surrender flag. We both dropped flat on the ground.

The SUV crawled up the road at just above an idle. The front windows were rolled down, and as it got closer I could make out the gold SHERIFF lettering on the side, and the two guys in front scanning the woods.

It crawled past us. We stayed flat until we couldn’t hear it any more.

“And that’s why I wanted to know if we had to cross any roads,” I said.

“No shit,” he said, and then made me wait while he struggled out of his shirt.

“Jesus _Christ_.” I knew he was sore from the way he moved, but more of him was bruised than not.

“What?” he said, rubbing his shirt in the moss and dirt at the base of the closest tree.

“They fucking worked you over, didn’t they?”

“Yeah.” He gingerly worked the bruised hand into a sleeve, and pulled the shirt back over his head. “How’s that?”

“It’s a white shirt with brown and green spots,” I said.

“Well, if you see a store out here with some Mossy Oak, you can buy us some.” He looked sideways at me. “That’s a kind of camouflage. Hunting gear. Looks like trees and leaves.”

I ignored that. “Scoot straight across this road, same as before?”

“Yeah. You go first, so if they’re still out there, they’ll only catch you.”

I was too tired to be mad. Too busy worrying about Donnie and Richard. I didn’t know if Owen would follow me across the road or not, and I didn’t care. I bolted across the road and slid down by a tree like it was home plate.

Nothing happened.

After a minute, he darted across and dived prone on the other side of the tree.

Nothing happened.

He pushed himself up with a wince. “Ready to go?”

“Soon as I get out of these goddamn thorns. Remind me to stay in the city from now on.”

“Sure, if you remind me to stay _out_ of the city.”

“Fine with me.” More than fine.

~~~

It got worse. No game trails, just trees and underbrush we had to fight our way through. I went around a snarl of vines – at least I was getting better at spotting those – and pushed through a grassy patch, which left tiny burrs stuck to me from my ankles to my shoulders.

Where the forest dipped into valleys, we had to cross little creeks, sluggish trickles of water with unpredictable sludge on either side. Owen nearly lost a shoe to one mud-filled divot. “Don’t step there,” he said unnecessarily, banging his foot on a rock to get the mud off. “Try the other side of that tree. Just don’t trip and fall on it.”

The tree he pointed to could have come straight out of the Devil’s workshop. Every last bit, trunk to top, was covered in thorns – big mean ones, six inches long, bristling out in an evil tangle.

“What the hell is _that_?”

“The tree? Honey locust. You never seen one?”

“No.” I crossed as fast as I could. Walking under that thing made my skin crawl.

“City boy.”

“Look, if you want to—”

“Shh.” He listened for a moment, then pointed up the slope to the east. I heard the crunch of tires on gravel.

“That’s not the paved road,” I said, once it was gone.

“No shit. Might branch off from that other one.”

“Well…if they were looking for us, they missed us,” I said. “Zip across, same as last time?”

“Yeah.”

“Your turn to go first.”

He snorted but didn’t argue, and we crept up the slope. We couldn’t even see the road until we were right up close, because thick grass and bushes had grown up along both sides. I hung back while he pushed his way through, paused for a listen, and darted across the road.

Right as he got to the edge, part of the woods jumped up and tackled him.

He let out an agonized sound as he hit the ground. It took me about five seconds too long to make sense of what I was seeing, that he was trying to fight off a guy wearing some of that trees-and-leaves gear. Trying and failing – the guy held him down with one hand, and radioed for help with the other.

I scrambled forward, thinking if I could tackle Mossy Oak and hit him a few times, Owen and I could make it back into the woods. But right as I got to the edge of the underbrush, engine noise came roaring up the road. I froze, grass rustling all around me. A Caprice in sheriff’s livery pulled up to a stop, maybe ten inches past where I was hunkered down.

There was nowhere to go. If I moved, the grass would move.

Black boots stepped out of the car and walked over to the far side of the road, to where the hunter was sitting on Owen, who was cussing up a storm. Boots said something to his shoulder radio, facing away from me so I didn’t catch it. There was a hiss of static and words in response.

Mossy Oak dragged Owen to his feet, and Owen’s language switched targets. Honestly, I know I can shoot my mouth off, but one thing I’ve never done is ask a cop how his mama escaped from the bacon factory.

Boots calmly grabbed Owen’s throat with one hand and punched him in the gut with the other, a vicious combo that made Owen go wobbly-kneed and breathless. “Shut your mouth, asshole. Where’s Hale at?”

“You want me to shut up or talk?” Owen wheezed. “I can’t do both, genius.”

Mossy Oak scowled and shifted enough to grab Owen’s hand and twist it behind him. Yeah, _that_ hand.

I hope to God I never hear a scream like that again. Owen’s back arched, he came up on his toes, and he would have fallen down if Boots hadn’t reached out to help hold him. He dangled between the two of them, making little keening sounds that might have been more screams, if he could have gotten enough breath to start. Neither of them batted an eye.

“I asked you a question,” Boots said, all up in Owen’s face. “Where’s that bounty hunter?”

Dry grass scratched my palms as my hands clenched. Stupid bastards. If Owen couldn’t even scream, how did they expect him to talk?

They figured that out and let him drop to the ground. He writhed for a minute, curling up around his hand, and then Boots was on him again, pinning him with one knee on either side of his rib cage.

“Still waitin’ on my answer. Where’s your friend at?” One thick hand took hold of Owen’s black-and-blue fingers and started to squeeze.

I got ready to launch. Mossy Oak had a shotgun slung over his shoulder, but if I got in close, he couldn’t hit me. If I used him as a meat shield from the other one…

The sound that came out of Owen could have been a laugh, or a sob, or maybe some of each. “Friend, my _ass_. Don’t you know nothing? He don’t give a fuck about me. He went one way, an’ I went the other. Might wanna check with your friends downriver, if they seen anyone swimming.”

Boots scowled and got on his radio again. This time I heard the answer. _Bring him in. Everyone else keep looking. Focus on the river and the north logging road._

~~~

I laid there for a long time after they were gone.

How many people was “everyone else”? Five? Fifty? No doubt every one of them grew up in these woods, while I barely knew which way was up. Every flicker and rustle could be one of the cousins getting line of sight on me.

Donnie. Richard. I had to fix this, or die trying.

I don’t remember running across the road, but I must have. I remember landing in the grass on the other side, and listening. No gunshots. A good start.

The terrain to the east sloped up again, steeper than we’d dealt with up to now. No thorn vines, at least, but I had to pick my way across slippery stretches where little waterfalls painted the rocks with slimy moss. Finally I found a game trail like we’d been on earlier, one that led me to the top of the ridge.

I wasn’t planning on staying up there for long, but the ridge dropped off on either side, and I needed to find a better place to get down, so I walked, and walked, even though it was taking me more northeast than I wanted. The only other trail I saw went off to the west. I should have taken more note of that than I did.

A few minutes later, I glanced behind me out of habit. I could just see where the ridge split into the southwest and west forks.

Something moved. Something that looked like trees.

I turned around and ran.

A voice yelled at me to stop, which only told me I wasn’t crazy. I ran faster.

There was a _boom_ behind me. Bark exploded off a tree trunk to my left.

Getting shot at will give you about four Red Bulls of energy, instantly. I damn near lifted off the ground, and something in the back of my mind made ugly comparisons to a duck hunt. I didn’t need to go up, I needed to go to ground. And I could only think of one way to do that.

Another shotgun blast tore through the trees.

I flung myself off the side of the ridge.

It was right out of my worst nightmares, and I mean that literally, but there was nowhere else to go. I refused to die from getting shot in the Blakeley County woods by one of the goddamn inbred Reaves motherfuckers, so off I went.

It wasn’t _quite_ as stupid and suicidal as it sounds. It wasn’t a sheer cliff right there; it was a steep slope full of rocks and trees and deep-rooted bushes. I didn’t know whether to curl up in a ball for protection, or spread out so I could catch something to slow me down, but it probably wouldn’t have made a difference either way. I hit six or eight or a dozen things, fell through some bushes, and crunched to a stop, half-under a tangle of dead branches between two rocks. A bunch of shit I’d knocked loose rained down over and past me.

My left leg was jammed against a sharp corner of rock, and it hurt like hell, but I kept my head down and didn't move. From the questions flying back and forth way up above, it sounded like they’d lost track of me as I fell.

After a while, it got quiet. I figured they’d given up. Most likely, they thought I was dead.

I hoped they were wrong.

I eased my leg to a better position and spit out dirt. Below me, the slope tilted away, still a long way to slide from where I was hanging on.

The clump of dead branches creaked in a way that wasn’t encouraging. I dragged myself up a bit with the help of a rock, hoping it wouldn’t be the next thing to come loose, and tucked myself just above it to assess the situation.

My shirt had picked up a jagged pattern of dark red splotches and streaks. That was new. The tough bushes clinging to the slope hadn’t taken kindly to being mowed down, and they’d clawed the hell out of me as I tumbled past. That was on top of the bruises I was going to have from bouncing off the trees. The middle of my back hurt like flaming hell, and the cherry on top was that my shoulder was firing electrical shocks down my arm again. 

At least the shotgun hadn’t tagged me. I’m not afraid of dying, but there are good ways and bad ways to go. Ending up as scattered bones on a lonely bluff isn’t one I’d choose.

I started climbing down. I say “climb,” but it was more like lowering myself down by inches, trying to find the least-steep path, while working my way around boulders and briar vines. About halfway down, I got stuck above a patch of loose dirt and gravel. One of the larger rocks looked like it was anchored better, so I kicked it a couple of times with my toe, and then stepped on it to cross over.

Of course it skated out from under my foot, and then everything under me was sliding downhill, dragging me toward a twenty-foot drop-off. I whipped around to grab a tree and nearly knocked myself out. Everything went white for a minute, and when the slope came back into focus, my teeth hurt, and my feet were dangling in the air. I’d caught the tree with my left arm and my chin.

Pulling myself back up with one arm was fun. The other was tingling from my shoulder to the tips of my fingers. I finally got back on solid ground, with my feet braced against the tree. Not dead yet. _Take that, Reaves, and fuck you._ I wiped blood off my chin with the tail of my shirt – which wasn’t going to survive this ordeal, even if I somehow did – and started inching my way down again.

When I got to a relatively flat little shelf, I took a minute to rest and look around. The base of the slope wasn’t too much further, but it was just as steep as what I’d already come down. And at the bottom, there was a flat black surface. It took me a minute to recognize what I was looking at.

A road. It had to be the road into the park. I hadn’t realized I was that close to it. I’d been focused on what was right around me: the next five feet, and then the next five.

The local boys would know I’d land somewhere around here, if I made it down at all. I had to assume they were still searching for me. Anyone I ran into might be on the enemy team.

I’d traveled northeast on the ridge, so Coster County was still a few hours to the south, at walking speed. Two hours at least, if I was in good shape, and the terrain wasn’t bad.

On the other hand…I trusted exactly one person in this county, and her place wasn’t far from here, if I remembered the map right.

She might be at home, or she might not. I debated with myself, knowing the clock was ticking. I had to pick whatever would get me in touch with Donnie faster. If Liz wasn’t home, it would take that much longer to backtrack. Still, crossing the county line wouldn’t be an instant win either. I’d have to try to flag someone down on the highway. Someone who would stop, after dark, for a guy in a torn and bloody shirt.

Liz might not automatically take me for a serial killer, I decided. To get to her cabin, I’d need to hike along this road for a while, down one of the side roads, and then up a side street to her place. That would be the fastest route. Assuming nobody saw me. If Russ’s cousins had been staking out an old logging road, how many more might be watching the way out of the park?

I took a few minutes to listen. Everything was quiet, almost eerie, like the lowering clouds were stifling the normal forest sounds. I eased down the last part of the slope, landed in the grassy ditch, and darted across the paved part, back into the trees.

Raindrops pattered on the leaves and raised a damp, musty smell from the ground while I fought through more forest. The road was the best way to navigate, so I kept it in sight and stopped moving when I heard a car. I thought the trees were thick enough to hide me, but I didn’t want to find out I was wrong.

The briar vines were harder to see in the dusk.

Mental tiredness is one thing, but I was starting to stagger. From where I came down the ridge to Liz’s place, it’s about two miles, which shouldn’t take all that long, but it wasn’t your normal walk in the park, so to speak.

I remember I came across a clearing under a huge tree, where two big roots curved around in a circle. A thick carpet of moss had filled it in, like a soft, dark bed in the middle of the wilderness. I wanted so bad to lie down. Let my back unknot a little. Rest my eyes.

If I stopped moving, no telling when I’d start again. I dragged my feet forward.

When I got to the last turn, I felt lightheaded with relief. One more hill to get up, and a few stairs. I looked up the street toward Liz’s cabin.

Sitting in her driveway was a white Caprice with gold lettering. 

I looked at it for a minute. No time or energy for emotions. I turned right and cut between two of the cabins on her side of the road.

The woods sloped down to a creek, a whisper of dark water trickling through the shadows. There were fewer leaves on the bank, less noise when you’re walking, so I made my way along there until Liz’s house was above me.

Slowly, I pulled myself up to the rear corner of the cabin. The Caprice’s headlights slashed a bright strip between Liz’s house and her neighbor’s. I stayed low and left of it, in the shadow of the back deck.

“Not since last Tuesday, hon.” Liz’s voice came from the front of the house. “If I hear from him, I can let you know. What’s the problem exactly?”

I didn’t catch the response, but it sounded like an answer and a question.

“No, it was the first time I’d seen him in a while. We were catching up. I hadn’t seen him since, oh, gosh, before your aunt Patty was in that accident. How’s she doing? Did Jeannie come down from Knoxville to stay with her?”

I felt the side of my mouth lift up as Liz peppered him with question after question, all caring and friendly, completely derailing him from what he wanted to talk about.

“OK then,” she finished sunnily, “you tell her I said hello, and I’m thinking about her!”

Footsteps tromped down the stairs. Two car doors slammed. A motor fired up and rumbled off into the distance.

I hauled myself upright with the help of the deck railing. Six steps doesn’t sound like a lot until you’re exhausted and dizzy, and then it might as well be Everest, but I made it. I leaned against the wall in the darkness and knocked on the back door.

No response at first. I probably wouldn’t have answered it, if I’d been her. I pushed myself off the wall and tapped again, trying for a not-aggressive volume.

The curtain moved the slightest bit. The lock rattled, the door swung open, and there was Liz, staring at me with wide eyes.

“Help?” I said.

She said some words that she probably wouldn’t want me repeating to you, and threw her arms around me to help me inside. I wish I’d been in more of a condition to appreciate it. I could barely navigate myself over the doormat.

“Jesus, Cade, come on baby, just a little farther. Sit here.”

It was a chair with a rainbow afghan on it. “Don’ wanna bleed on your stuff,” I objected.

“I’ll make another one. Sit. Let me get my phone, I’ll call 911—”

“No,” I interrupted, and she started to argue. “Liz, _no_. I don’t know what they told you, but I’ve seriously pissed off your Reaves boys. And your 911 dispatch is probably run by the sheriff.”

“…Oh. Crap. OK. I’ve got a first aid kit, but—”

“I need to use your phone first,” I said. “Please.”

She handed it to me with questions in her eyes, and while I tapped Donnie’s number, I promised her I would explain, but I had to talk to him before I did anything else.

It rang.

It rang some more.

It went to voicemail. _Hey, you’ve reached Donnie Brent..._

I tried again.

It went to voicemail again.

I thumbed the red button and stared at the phone. A bunch of ugly words floated around inside my head, but I couldn’t get up the energy to say them. Ernie’s goons couldn’t have – I couldn’t let myself think it. Donnie was smart. He didn’t miss much.

“Hey!” I felt Liz’s hands on my shoulders. “No falling out of the chair, that’s just going to make things worse. Babe, what the hell did you do to yourself?” 

“Jumped off a mountain,” I said unsteadily.

“Off a _mountain_? Why?”

“Seemed like more fun than getting shot.”

She stared at me. “They were _literally_ shooting at you? Not threatening to?”

“You weren’t kidding about Blakeley County,” I said. “Fuckin’ hornet’s nest of Reaves.”

She made sure I was stable enough to stay in the chair, then went off and came back with some damp towels and a decent-sized first aid kit. “Out of the shirt, babe,” she said. “I need to see if any of that is actively bleeding.”

I fumbled with the buttons until she gently pushed my hands out of the way and did it herself - another thing I would have appreciated more if I wasn’t so preoccupied. My whole focus had been getting here so I could get in touch with Donnie. I had no idea what Richard’s number was. When I wanted to text him, I poked the button on my phone that said “Richard.”

“Tell me if I hurt you,” she said, and started wiping off blood and dirt with a damp towel. I couldn’t help shivering, even though the towel was warm. She paused. “Is that too—”

“No, it’s fine,” I said. “Better’n anything else that’s happened today.”

“Have you seriously managed to tick off the entire Reaves family? Is this about that case?”

“Pretty much. And yeah.” While she stuck bandages over a couple of the nastier scrapes, I filled her in on what had happened over the last 24 hours or so. I wasn’t sure if she’d even believe me, but as I talked, her face got more and more serious. When I was finished, she let out a slow breath.

“You know what small communities are like. There are always rumors, and ‘jokes’ with that edge that makes you wonder. The Reaves tend to arrange things to benefit their kin, and it’s only because they’re so generous that no one makes too much of a fuss. Ernest Reaves ran unopposed in our last election. I remember hearing someone at the supermarket joking that no one could afford the bodyguards you’d need to run against him.”

A truck rumbled down the road, and I turned toward the window too fast, which made my back twinge, and I stifled a few more cuss words.

She followed my look. “You think they’ll come back here?”

“I don’t know. They might.”

She bit her lip and looked around the cabin. “Can you make it up the stairs?”

“Maybe. Don’t laugh at me if I need to crawl.”

Liz tucked herself under my good arm, and I leaned on her and made it up the stairs without crawling. She put me in her spare bedroom, over more of my objections about getting her stuff dirty.

“That’s what washing machines are for,” she said. “Sit down, baby, you’re the same color as that sheet. Now stay there, I’ll be right back.” She hurried back down the stairs.

The bed looked like an awesome place to pass out, but I couldn’t, not without knowing what the hell was happening in Memphis. Or had happened.

No. Donnie was fine. Maybe his phone was dead.

Liz came back up with a glass of apple juice and two ibuprofen tablets. “Take those, and drink all of the juice. What else do you need?”

“I need to talk to Donnie, but he’s not answering,” I said.

“He wouldn’t recognize my number,” she pointed out. “You didn’t leave him a voicemail, so he wouldn’t know it’s you.”

I was so exhausted, I hadn’t made that connection. “You’re right. But…hell, I don’t know if I _should_ leave voicemail. If Ernie’s guys have picked him up, they might have his phone too.” I wasn’t going to forget that lesson anytime soon.

“Text, maybe? Do y’all have any kind of code?”

I thought about it. “No, but let me try this.”

_Hey dude, I’m at my girlfriend’s place & she’s about to break out the Captain Morgan’s again. Call me at this # if you want to come over_

“Hopefully he’ll get that,” I said. “If he doesn’t call…I don’t know.”

“Can you call Hank?”

I laughed a little. “I’m not supposed to be here. He told me to wait.”

“Oh, babe,” she sighed. “Couldn’t you call him anyway?”

“God, no. I can’t call up Hank and say, ‘I know you told me not to do this, but I did it anyway, so now I need you to save my ass. Again. And Donnie and Richard, because oh by the way, they decided to help me without telling you.’”

“Then what _are_ you going to do, love? I’ll help you however I can, but I’m not front-line material here.”

The phone in my hand rang, and I nearly dropped it, trying to punch the green button to answer.

“Donnie?”

A pause. “Cade,” said a smooth and polished voice. “Donnie said it was probably you.”


	10. Chapter 10

Liz must have seen something in my face, because she went utterly still.

“Where in the world did you get off to, Cade?” said Russ. “Tyler said you’d pinballed all the way down Shakerag Bluff. Last I heard, they were still looking for you in the park. Ace’s boys had an easier time rounding up Donnie, and that was in a big city.”

“You’re lying to me,” I said. “You have his phone, that’s all I know for sure.”

“I don’t blame you for being cautious,” he said, and there was a pause. A voice said something away from the phone, and a different voice came over the line.

“Dude,” said Donnie evenly, “you fuckin’ owe me.”

I had to use both hands to hold the phone. “Donnie—” 

“I told this here used-car salesman he was crazy if he thought I’d let him get his hands on Tara. And you’d better tell him the same th—” A thud and a choked-off sound of pain made me cringe.

Russ got back on the line. “You boys have a knack for digging yourselves in deeper, don’t you?” Exasperation strained the smooth tone he was trying to hang on to.

“What do you want?”

He sighed. “What I really want, you can’t give me. I want all of this to go away. Ernie seems to think if we get rid of enough people, we can keep everything under wraps. When it was just Owen and Tara, that was one thing, but once you and your team got involved – it’s snowballed, and I don’t know how far he wants to take this.”

“If you had the laptop – that’s the only real evidence, isn’t it?” I said. “If you had that – everything else is our word against yours. And you’re Russ Reaves, you’ve got all the money and all the lawyers, we couldn’t touch you, right?”

“I’d like to think so,” he said.

“If I can get you that, will you let Donnie go?” I didn’t want to beg, but I was close enough.

“Hmm. You’ve given up on Owen?”

“God, yes, I don’t care. Keep him. Throw him in a hole.”

“Could you get me Tara, too?”

My stomach lurched. Tara, pale and determined, who’d asked for our help. She trusted us. She trusted _me_ , because Donnie said she could. “Do you – do you know she just had a kid?”

“Yes, Ace said he thought there was a baby. I won’t let Ernie hurt her, if that’s what you’re concerned about. I’m rather fond of her. There are other ways of keeping people quiet, especially if they have loved ones.”

Fucking bastard. He hadn’t counted months, I was sure of it. He’d be more tense if he’d known there was a question whose kid it was.

“In that case, I can get you Tara.” My voice didn’t even sound like mine.

“If we do this, I’ll have to do it behind Ernie’s back,” he warned. “But that’s a deal I would make with you. Tara, plus what she stole from me, in exchange for your friend.”

Donnie’s voice rose from somewhere behind Russ. “Cade, don’t you fuckin’ dare—" Another thump and a growl cut him off.

“We don’t have much time,” said Russ. “Ernie’s in Memphis, trying to turn up Tara, but he said he’d be back here, where we are, by midnight. After that, I can’t guarantee your friend’s safety. Call me at this number once you’re ready to meet. I’ll tell you where to go.”

“OK.”

The line went dead.

I looked at Liz. I didn’t even have the words to explain how fucked everything was. She was in as much danger as any of us. I’d told her everything, so that put her on Ernie’s list too, even if neither of them knew it yet.

She took the phone out of my hands. “Love—”

“He’s picked up Donnie,” I said. I could hardly breathe under the weight of everything. “I should have shot myself when I had the chance.”

Her hands squeezed mine. “Babe, _no_.”

“I told Russ I’d get him the laptop, but I don’t know where it is. Tara had it. They gave it to Richard. I don’t have any way to contact either of them. I can’t…if he… _fuck_.”

“ _Cade_ ,” Liz said, “Please, listen to me. He hasn’t won yet.”

“He basically has, though. I have to—” I tried to stand up.

“Babe, _stop_. Just stop. Look at me.” She held my eyes. “How much sleep are you running on right now?”

“Couple hours.”

“When did you last eat anything?”

The idea of food made me queasy. “I don’t know. Probably this morning.”

“Love, you’re running on fumes in every way that matters. You have to let me help you. If Ernest Reaves is involved – can we call the FBI?”

“We’d have to convince them we weren’t crazy, that all of this is really happening, and that the local cops are corrupt. They’d have to come from the closest field office…there’s not enough time. I just need to do what he says. I need to get the laptop. I need _Richard_.”

“OK. If Richard was a skip, how would you find him?”

“I’d…I’d start by talking to Richard,” I said helplessly. “He’s got all these search tools; he can track down addresses, vehicles, social media accounts…”

“Social media?” She picked up her phone again. “What does he use the most? Could you message him? Or could I?”

“He only uses them for work,” I said. “He says it’s a security risk. He wouldn’t notice he had a message right away.”

She looked him up anyway, but like I’d told her, he hardly ever posted anything.

“Here’s something,” she said suddenly. “This game store tagged him today. They’re having some kind of tournament.” She showed me, and I recognized the little spaceship figures. He had a few like that on his desk.

“There’s no way he’d be there, not with all this shit going on,” I said. But trying to put myself in Richard’s shoes had given me an idea, and I used Liz’s phone to call the store.

A cheerful voice answered, “Rattlebone Games, how can I help you?”

“Hey, uh, this may be a weird question,” I said, “but I’m trying to find a friend of mine, Richard Ackerman. I think he plays games at your store sometimes.”

“Richard? Yeah, he was supposed to be here tonight. He owes me a rematch with those frackin’ Y-wings.”

“Do you know how to get in touch with him?” I asked. “A friend of ours is in the hospital, it’s pretty serious, and my phone died, so—”

“You need his number? Hang on.” There was a rustle and a background yell. _HEY ALAN! ALAN! DO YOU HAVE RICHARD’S CELL?_

I’m not usually the praying sort, that’s more Alex’s department, but I might have sent up a few words while I waited on the answer. This had been a total stab in the dark. I didn’t want to hope too much. I mimed writing at Liz, and she found me a notepad and a pen.

The game store guy got back on the phone. “OK, ready?” He read off a number.

“Thanks, man, I really appreciate it,” I told him.

“No problem. Hope your friend’s OK.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Richard never answered actual phone calls, so I texted him. _Hey, those dickheads who wouldn’t share that casefile are bigger dickheads than I thought. Call me ASAP at this # when you get this._

“What next?” Liz asked. “You’ve got to be starving. What can I feed you?”

I shook my head. As worked up as I was, I wouldn’t have been able to keep anything down. Another thing I’d gotten used to in my after-North-Carolina life.

The phone chirped. _If this is who I think it is, what do I use to find skips?_

 _Your magic box_ , I sent back.

 _I don’t want to call u in case dickheads r listening,_ came the response. _Meet up?_

_Where?_

_The park by Central BBQ?_

I asked Liz if I could borrow her car to run down to Memphis. “I don’t want to involve you in this any more than you already are…”

“I’ll drive,” she said decisively.

I was too tired to argue. _Should take me about an hour to get there from where I am_

_Cya there_

I was surprised to realize I’d finished the glass of apple juice. It helped more than I expected. I was able to get down the stairs like a normal person.

Liz handed me a clean shirt. “Here, put this on. Is there anything else we need from here before we leave?” she asked.

“I’m guessing you don’t keep guns in the house.”

“Sorry, no.”

“I figured.” The shirt was a casual gray button-up, in nicer fabric than I was used to. “Where did this come from?”

She was getting a jacket out of the hall closet, but I saw the back of her neck flush. “It’s – an ex-boyfriend of mine left it here a while ago.” She headed for the door to the garage without looking at me.

I wasn’t entirely sure how I felt about that, or about her reaction, but it was that shirt or nothing. It was loose on me, so I tucked it in.

“Um…” She had stopped at the window in the front room. “We may have a problem.”

My heart skipped a beat. “Cops coming back?” 

“No, they’re not here…but there’s a sheriff’s car at the end of the street.”

“Blocking it?”

“No, come see. I think they’re just watching.”

She was right. Through the trees, I could see the white car parked at the corner, and the two deputies leaning against it, where they’d have a good view of both roads.

“They still think I might be headed this way. Is there a back road out of here?”

“No, we’ll have to go past them. Do you want to lie down in the back seat? I can throw a blanket over you.”

“That could work,” I said. “Assuming they don’t flag you down to ask where you’re going. A big lump in the back seat’s going to be obvious, especially if they’re watching for you to leave.” Another solution jumped into my head, and I kicked it out again just as fast. Not going there.

“The only other…” She stopped. She’d thought of it too.

My stomach tried to trade places with my lungs. Good thing I hadn’t eaten, if this was headed where I thought it was. “The trunk?”

“Can you? If you can’t, that’s OK. We’ll find another way.”

“We can try it and see.” I was able to keep my voice steady. Thumbs up to me.

“I could drive out to the highway and let you out again. It would be five minutes.”

Time wasn’t the issue. Five minutes or five hours, it would have to start with me putting myself in there. I’d have to watch the trunk lid come down, and hear the slam, and keep myself from screaming to be let out. Not that that ever helped in the nightmares.

But...it would get me past the deputies. The ones at the end of the street, and any others. If Russ wasn’t planning to tell his brother about our deal, Ernie’s guys would still be searching for me.

“You’d better wait until we cross the county line,” I said reluctantly. “It won’t surprise me if they’ve set up a DUI checkpoint somewhere, so they can look inside the cars leaving the county. And you’ll want to pull over someplace without a lot of traffic.”

She grimaced but didn’t disagree. “That’ll be more like 20 minutes. Are you sure you’ll be OK?”

“No. But I’ll make it, one way or another.”

She gathered up the red-and-brown afghan that hung over the back of the couch. “We can put this in there. It won’t be quite so uncomfortable.”

She had no idea how uncomfortable it could be. I could feel my mind jerking away, like a fish fighting on a line. I didn’t want to think about it. I didn’t want to remember.

 _Harden the fuck up, Cade._ This wasn’t last time. I could move around if I needed to. It might suck, but compared to everything else that had blown up today, this was nothing.

My stomach wasn’t buying that argument, and my shoulder throbbed like it was remembering for me, since I refused to. _Look_ , I told it as Liz locked the door behind us, _this is simple. Get out of Blakeley. Meet Richard. Fix the whole goddamn mess. Don’t freak out and scare Liz. Think about something else._

Liz popped the trunk, and I rolled in like everything was fine.

“Here’s this,” she said, handing me the afghan. “Are you OK?”

“I’m OK.” _I’m OK, I’m OK, I’m OK._ If I said it enough times, I’d believe it.

“I know exactly where I want to pull over. I’ll get there as quick as I can without speeding,” she promised me, and clicked the trunk closed instead of slamming it. I appreciated that.

It was still a tiny fucking box. The sound of my breathing rebounded off the trunk lid right above my head, way too close and way too fast.

The car started up. It’s a hell of a lot louder when you’re not in the cabin.

The shrink had told me about a breathing thing. What was it? In for a four-count, hold for two, exhale for six. Ground yourself in what’s around you, he’d said. List things you can see, things you can hear, things you can touch.

Great advice, except I couldn’t see shit, and engine noise rattled my head from the inside out. My hands clenched on the afghan. At least that was something. I tangled my fingers in it, working them into the loops of yarn. There were little holes in the pattern, I remembered that. I saw them with the tips of my fingers instead of my eyes.

In my head, I pictured the blanket where it usually lay on the back of Liz’s couch. The couch was light brown fabric, definitely not new, but it was the most comfortable one I’d ever sunk into. A table sat on one side of it, and a curvy wooden lamp with a light-colored shade. A stone fireplace anchored one end of the room, and a red rug spread across the floor between the fireplace and the couch.

It probably wasn’t what the shrink had meant when he was talking about visualizing, but it seemed to help. I pictured all the details I could remember from Liz’s place. The white fridge with the poetry magnets, the rag rugs on the kitchen floor, the window with the ruffled curtain that had the best view of the bird feeder...

I rocked as the car slowed down, stopped, and rolled forward again. Stop and go traffic, maybe? Weird for a Saturday night.

A red glow filtered in from the brake lights, enough so I could pick out the trunk’s escape handle above me. I let go of the blanket long enough to run my hand over it, like I needed to touch it to make it real.

The car crawled forward and stopped again. Voices? It was hard to hear over the idling engine, but someone was definitely talking. A male voice, with a stern, measured inflection.

Liz answered, “Along the highway? No, sir.”

Maybe I’d been right, and Ernie had gotten his boys to set up a checkpoint. If you spend long enough in law enforcement, you start to sense when people are hiding something. How good was Liz’s poker face? My hands clenched in the afghan again. I should have made her stay home. If I could. At least I should have tried harder to talk her out of driving. What kind of idiot reacts to his friends being in danger by putting _more_ friends in danger?

“OK, I will. Thanks for the warning.”

Gentle acceleration pressed me back. We were moving again, and picking up speed. I put my head back down on the afghan. The smell of Liz’s cabin clung to it, woodsy and green. Somehow there was more air around the afghan than in the rest of the tiny dark box. In for four, hold for two, out for six. Rinse and repeat.

I should have asked her where she was planning to pull over, I thought. A few small roads crossed this one, with nothing but a blinking yellow light and a stop sign to mark them. Probably one of those. I kept my eyes on the T-shaped escape handle for a long time, and listened to the drone of road noise.

I woke up at the clunk of the trunk latch, with no idea where I was. I tried to sit up, and banged my head and my ankle at the same time the trunk lid rose up. Liz jumped at the sound, and then laughed with astonishment. “Hon, did you actually fall asleep? I wasn’t sure if you were really OK, or just saying that to make me feel better.”

I was as surprised as she was. “This blanket is magic,” I said, getting myself disentangled and out of the trunk. “Was that a DUI checkpoint we stopped at, back there?”

“Not exactly; they were stopping everyone to ask if we’d seen a hitchhiker. Apparently you’re dangerous, and I should call the sheriff’s office if I see you.”

“I’m definitely dangerous. To them. How much further to Memphis?”

“Thirty minutes,” she said. “I had to go farther than I thought to get out of traffic.”

~~~

It was actually thirty-two minutes, including the quick stop at 7-11 for coffee, before we pulled into the tiny parking lot next to the park. I told Liz to stay in the car and keep it running. “If it looks like things are going pear-shaped, I need you to leave, OK? Go up to the restaurant and call the cops from there.” She looked unhappy, but she agreed.

I walked down the sidewalk toward the park’s entry gate. A homeless guy was sitting with his head down, back to the wall, and I ignored him other than making sure I didn’t get too close.

Right as I walked past him, he said my name. Scared the shit out of me.

“Richard?! What the fuck—”

“I didn’t know if you were under duress when you texted me,” he said, standing up. “I wanted to see how you got here. Who’s in the car?”

“My friend Liz, she’s fine. God, I need to talk to you. Do you know where Tara is?”

“Yeah. Donnie gave me her number when he dropped off the laptop, in case I needed to ask her anything about it.” Richard walked back to the car with me, and we followed his directions to a hotel a few blocks away.

He wasn’t happy to hear that Russ had picked up Donnie, but he wasn’t surprised. Earlier, I’d told Donnie I’d check in with him no later than 1:00. When I hadn’t called by 2:00 – and didn’t answer when he called me – he called Richard.

“He told me to lock my doors,” Richard said. “He said shit might have gone off the rails, and he was coming back over to my place. He never showed up. I tried to call him, and I tried to call you, and neither of you was answering.

“I threw Russ’s laptop and mine in my backpack and borrowed Tony’s car to come over here. Tara and I thought this was the safest base of operations. Turn in past the hedge there.”

The hotel was a wide, two-story building with columns and wooden railings along the front, a gracious old Southern lady who had let herself go. Paint peeled off the railings in thin strips, and the room, when Tara nervously unlocked the door for us, had that musty funk no amount of cleaning can get out. Still, the faded bedspread was neat and tidy, and the white-tiled bathroom was clean. Better than some places I’ve stayed at. 

Liz and Tara did that instant-friends thing that girls do sometimes – I think it had to do with the soft “oh” sound that Liz made when she saw Logan – and they both sat on the bed. Richard perched on the spindly chair by the desk where he’d set up his laptop, and I took the other chair, a flowery escapee from some grandmother’s sitting room.

I filled in Richard and Tara on what had been going on; how Ernest Reaves had chucked me in the basement with Owen, what I’d learned about the laptop; how we’d escaped and how they picked up Owen again. How Ernie had unlocked my phone and used it to find Donnie.

“Holy crap,” said Richard, “I’ve never thought about that as a thin spot.”

“If you haven’t, that makes me feel better,” I said. “But that’s where we are now. We don’t have a lot of time. Three hours, maybe less. If we can’t come up with a way to spike his wheel or find Donnie and Owen before that, I don’t know what we’re going to do. I told him—” I wasn’t sure if I should admit it. “I told him I’d bring him the laptop, and Tara. That’s what he wants.”

“You said you’d give him _Tara?”_ Richard said. “Jeez, Cade, that’s…that’s…”

“That’s how you deal with Russ,” Tara said. “Tell him what he wants to hear.”

“But I’m not giving him what he wants,” I said to her. “Donnie would kick my ass from here to the river, and then drown me in it.”

“And I’d help him,” Richard huffed. I was seriously starting to think I was the only male in two counties who didn’t have a crush on Tara.

“Well, I’m not going to do that,” I told him, “but I don’t have another plan right now. I’m running on two and a half hours of sleep, bad gas station coffee, and a strong need to fuck up Russ. I don’t have the best judgement right now. If you have any ideas, I’d love to hear them.”

He and Tara looked at each other. “Not right offhand,” he admitted. “We’ve been trying to come up with something.

“Tara caught me up on what she told you and Donnie earlier. We know the Reaves can field more manpower and firepower than we can access on short notice, so if we want to go on the offensive, we’ll have to outmaneuver them. We need to hit them where it hurts, or threaten to. So Tara and I spent a few hours on research…and you wouldn’t _believe_ how much shady shit we’ve turned up.”

I told him no, I’d believe anything and everything.

He and Tara had gone digging through anything publicly accessible – old news stories, property records, county election data, everything they could think of. “Nothing ever sticks to these guys,” Richard said. “There are all these allegations...no-bid contracts for county work, vote-buying, reduced jail sentences for certain people who _coincidentally_ make donations to the sheriff’s nonprofit foundation. He runs two of those, actually, and no one’s got the authority to audit them.

“Then that car dealership, that’s got a fun history. It was built right outside Irvine city limits, originally. They got all the benefits of being close to the city, but with much lower taxes. Or, at least, it was supposed to be outside the city limits. The city said it straddled the line, and sued them over it, but the court sided with the Reaves.

“That area along the highway around the dealership got built up with more car dealerships and businesses – and if you source the funding, it looks like some of the city council members were encouraging people to build out that way, which seems weird…until you find the case ten years later where the city annexed that part of the road. Extended the city limits.”

“I’ll bet the Reaves loved that,” I said.

“They fought it, but the county approved it. Three years later – surprise, surprise – there’s a Reaves heading up the planning and zoning commission. And that’s great, if you’re a Reaves, because most of the land that gets approved for development these days belongs to them or their kin.”

“OK,” I said, “I don’t want to cut you off, but how does that help us?”

“I don’t know,” Richard admitted. “There’s more stuff – like if you want to own a liquor store in Blakeley, you’d better be related to the Reaves – but I couldn’t find proof of anything blatantly illegal. When you texted me, I had my phone in my hand. I was about to call Hank. I thought he might be able to get in touch with someone at the TBI.”

“It’d take too much time to convince anyone to believe us,” I said. “Even if none of the shady stuff is illegal, is there anything we could use some other way? Threaten to publicize it, maybe?”

“None of it’s news, though,” said Liz, “Everyone in Blakeley knows all of that. How about the chop shop that Russ was running? Could we call the cops on it? Or tell him we were going to?”

“You mean the cops that Ernest Reaves is in charge of?” Richard asked.

“Or another agency. The TBI would get it, I’m sure, if we said we couldn’t call the county because the junkyard’s owner was related to the sheriff. What I mean is, we’d tell Russ that we’re going to report it. We wouldn’t have to get the TBI there on the spot.”

“Russ might have moved his operation, though,” I said. “That’s what I’d have done, with Owen and Tara running around loose.”

“I guess that’s possible. So what else would they want to hide?” Liz asked.

I had an idea, but I hated to spill Tara’s personal business in front of Richard and Liz.

Tara noticed me looking at her. “What?”

I chose my words carefully. “When we were talking in Dalton, you mentioned that Russ was close to some of the girls in the office. And some of them left.”

She nodded, not sure where I was going with that.

“Do you think there might be any unofficial Reaves kids out there that he wouldn’t want anybody to know about?”

“Is he _that_ kind of a sleazeball?” Liz asked. “That would be something, if we could prove it. He’s married. I think he’s a board member at his church.”

Tara had flinched slightly, but her voice was steady when she answered me. “It wouldn’t surprise me. There were girls who left to have kids, and Russ used to send checks to some of them. From his personal account, I mean, not the dealership account.”

“He wrote them literal physical _checks_?” Richard said.

“What do you expect him to do, Venmo it?” I asked.

“If you want to hide a transaction, you pay cash. Duh.”

“I wonder how many girls he writes checks to, and how often,” Liz said thoughtfully.

“All of his his bank statements are at the office,” Tara said. “They have copies of the checks on the last page of each month. They’re in a locked file cabinet, but he keeps the key in his top left desk drawer.”

“So here’s what we do.” Richard bounced in his chair. “Tara sneaks into the dealership and steals those statements. Then we call Russ and threaten to send copies to the local news station, or post them on Twitter. Like Cade said, publicize it.”

“How is she supposed to sneak into the dealership?” I asked. “Russ’d be crazy if he hadn’t changed the locks when she and Owen left.”

“It’s a key card pad, not a lock,” Tara said, “but you’re right. I threw away my card a while ago. I’m sure he deactivated it.”

“A key card?” Richard said. “Magnetic door lock?”

“I’m not sure how it works. You wave your card at the pad, and when the door goes _clunk_ , it’s open.”

“Do you need the card to get out? Like, after hours?”

“No, it...it sort of knows you’re there? It clunks when you walk up to it.”

He nodded with satisfaction. “I think we can get you inside.”

“Or me,” I said. “Tara doesn’t have to be there.”

“No, it needs to be me,” she said. “I know what I’m looking for. Russ keeps his financial records for seven years before he shreds them, so that filing cabinet is full.”

We argued about it, but she finally wore me down. Donnie’s right, there’s more willpower than you’d expect to find packed into five-foot-nothing. We agreed that she and I would head for the dealership together, break in, and go through the statements.

“Tara can point out the names she recognizes on the checks,” I said. “And...wait, maybe we should copy them, so we’re not actually stealing anything.”

“Take pictures of them,” Richard said. “I’ll get you a burner phone, and you send the pictures to me. They’ll be geotagged with your location. Extra proof that they are what we say they are.”

“OK, and then I’ll call Russ and tell him what we’re doing. Hold on, hear me out.” They were already trying to argue. “I’ll tell Russ that if he doesn’t want these checks to be the most-clicked-on story in Blakeley tomorrow, he needs to turn Owen and Donnie loose. If he does that – and we confirm it – then Tara and I can leave the dang laptop on his desk, right where she took it from. See? The stick and the carrot.”

“What if you get caught trying to break in?” Liz said.

“Caught by who? Tara, does he have a night security guard?”

“He didn’t when I was there. There’s a camera system, but it’s not recording anything.”

Richard blinked at her. “He put up fake cameras?”

“Well, they work. You can see the feeds through the window from outside. That’s the point, for them to be obvious. But he doesn’t want a – a permanent record of everything that goes on there, just in case.”

“Worried about a recording being seized as evidence, that makes sense,” Richard mused. “Still, no way to know if the feeds stay on-site, or if someone can view them remotely.” He scratched at his stubble. “I’ll ride along, and y’all drop me off before you get there. I just need to be where my scanner can pick up the county dispatch channel.”

“But you said the dealership is inside city limits now,” Liz said. “So wouldn’t that be the City of Irvine police?”

“They have their own police force? That’s awesome; less chance of them being friends of the sheriff. Though that wouldn’t stop them from arresting you two for breaking and entering.”

“If that happens, I’ll tell them what’s going on,” I said. “I’ll call Russ, to prove it. I’ll let them listen in.”

“Tell you what,” said Richard, “After you drop me off, I’ll call in a tip to the sheriff’s office. I’ll tell them C.J. Reaves is running a chop shop out of his scrapyard. Their dispatch is either going to send someone over, or flag it and call the sheriff, depending on who takes the call. The sheriff might even head over there himself. He might guess something’s going on, but he wouldn’t know what. Like Sun Tzu said, distract your enemy and divide his forces.”

It wasn’t a perfect plan, but it was the best we could do on short notice, and the clock was ticking.

Richard said he would run pick up his scanner from the office and grab a burner phone from Walmart. I told him to snag me a shirt that fit while he was there. The one I had wasn’t bad, but I still felt weird about it.

While he was gone, I borrowed the hotel room shower. If we got stopped by the Irvine cops, I’d be better off if I looked respectable. Or closer to it, anyway. I wasn’t going to wash off the bruise on my scraped chin, or the scratches all over my hands and arms. Still, a shower and a new shirt made me feel about eight hundred times better.

“Alright,” I said to everyone. “Are we ready to do this?”

Tara snuggled Logan close, kissed his head, and carefully passed him to Liz, who had agreed to stay here and wait for us to come back.

“Be careful,” she said to Tara. “He needs his mama.” 

When Tara nodded, Liz looked at me. “You too.”

“I’ll take care of her,” I promised.


	11. Chapter 11

Liz’s Blakeley license plate would blend in better, so we took her car. I dropped Richard off behind Irvine’s high school, a few streets over from police HQ, and headed for the edge of town with Tara.

Along the commercial strip, a few restaurants and bars were open, but everything else had shut down for the night. I parked by a dark shop off to one side of the dealership, and we circled through the trees behind the property so the cameras wouldn’t pick us up, just in case.

Rows and rows of cars were lined up between the two main buildings, most of them new and shiny, plus a few dented patients for the body shop. I stopped behind a dark gray Pacifica when we got close to the smaller building. A door at the back had “Employees Only” stenciled on it.

“Is that the door we want?” I asked.

“Oh, _wow_ ,” Tara breathed. She was looking at the cars. “He moved the chop shop _here_.”

“He _what_? How can you tell?”

She pointed at a row of cars parked by the building. “See that silver Audi, and the ones past it? Those aren’t ones we sell, and they’re not trade-ins, because they have license plates, instead of the dealership logo inserts. They can’t be here for the body shop; they’re not damaged. And if they were in for service, they wouldn’t be here. They’d be over by the other building.”

“Maybe the service lot was full?”

“They’d have hang tags on the mirrors. Every car gets a hang tag when they come in for service or body work. Look, the Audi has a Knox County plate. And the rest of them…”

An Audi, a Cadillac, an F-150, a BMW, even a damn Range Rover. Knox County, Shelby County, Hamilton. One Alabama plate, and one Kentucky. None of them with a hang tag.

“I wonder…” I said slowly, “do we even need to get inside? Hell, if you’re sure, I could call Russ and tell him I’m about to call Irvine PD about stolen vehicles in plain sight on his lot. He wouldn’t have time to move them. Is that enough of a bargaining chip?”

“I don’t know. It might—” She shrank back as headlights came around the front corner of the building.

My first thought was that it was a new security patrol. My second thought had a lot more cussing in it.

It was _my_ car.

Yeah, it’s a black Charger, and there are a lot of them out there. Four or five were sitting on the sales lot out front. I still knew mine. It was followed by a red SUV, and I recognized that one too.

The Trackhawk parked next to the door we’d been aiming for. Russ got out, looking tired and rumpled, and his front passenger turned out to be a familiar face too, even if he’d changed out of his Mossy Ass gear. Mossy opened the back door and pulled Owen out.

They weren’t taking any chances; Owen had both hands cuffed behind him, and he shuddered miserably when Mossy tugged on his arm. Next to me, Tara let out a tiny, breathy gasp.

My car had pulled in next to the silver Audi. A scowling, thick-shouldered bruiser got out of the driver’s seat. He had as many tattoos as Owen, maybe more, but the ace of spades on his forearm stood out. As he limped around to the other side of the car, I could see a bloody scratch running from his right ear down to his jaw.

“Ace?” I whispered to Tara.

She had pressed a trembling fist to her mouth, but she nodded tautly.

Ace opened the passenger door of the Charger and yanked Donnie out by one elbow. Donnie was cuffed like Owen was, and had either a bruise or a dirt smudge on the side of his face, but otherwise he seemed OK. Better than Ace, at any rate, which was probably why Ace was in such a mood. Idiot. If he’d been the one to jump Donnie, he shouldn’t have expected it to be easy.

He swung Donnie toward the building, and my heart went _thunk_ in something uncomfortably like hope. Ace might be good at jumping people, but he wasn’t a deputy. Donnie’s hands were facing _in_. He might could turn himself loose, if he got the chance to. If he’d had his key on him when they picked him up. And if they hadn’t learned from their mistake with me, and searched him better.

Over by the door Tara and I had planned to use, Ace shoved Donnie at the ground, a move calculated to land him on his ass, but Donnie twisted as he fell and landed more or less on his knees. He waited, eyes on the pavement, while Ace tromped away, and then cautiously folded his legs under himself and sat down. Mossy Ass followed Ace’s example and dumped Owen on the ground next to Donnie, but – I cussed some more – Mossy didn’t walk over to the other two, but stayed standing there. If Donnie did have his key, he wasn’t going to use it while they were watching.

It’s great to say you’re going to plan for every possible scenario, but what do you do when you get the impossible scenario instead? They’d outmaneuvered us without even meaning to. And they still had more manpower – three of them to one of me – and more firepower, two to nothing. Mossy didn’t have his shotgun, but Russ and Ace both had hip holsters. I couldn’t see what Ace had in his, but Russ’s looked like a 1911; probably that Wilson he’d told me about. 

I took a second to pull out the burner phone Richard had given me, and texted him a quick update.

_At dealership now, Russ is here, with Donnie & Owen & couple of goons_

_O shit he’s there??? What are u doing??_

_Not sure, stand by_

Russ stopped talking to Ace to answer his phone. Well, that made one of them distracted. Ace made sure Mossy was watching Owen and Donnie, and he limped over to a 4Runner at the end of a row, a familiar light bronze one. He came back with a lit cigarette and scanned the parking lot.

Russ got more and more agitated at his phone. “What was I supposed to do? Stay there?” he snapped. He paced down the sidewalk next to the building. “Well, how was I supposed to know who was on duty? I tried to call—”

Back up the sidewalk. “At the dealership. I—why not? There’s no one—”

Sharp, tinny sounds came from the phone, and he rubbed his temple with one hand. “I told him he had until midnight. Are you going to make a liar out of me again?”

I whispered to Tara, “I don’t think Ernie wants him to wait. I might have to jump in here. Can I have the laptop? I’ve got an idea.”

She handed it to me and whispered back, “What do you want me to do?”

“Stay here. This might not work, and I don’t want you involved.”

“I’m already involved. Why don’t we go talk to him?”

“ _Talk_ to him? Sweetheart, all he needs is you and Owen and the laptop in the same place. Then he can shoot all of us, and that solves his problem.”

“No, it doesn’t, because Richard and Liz know everything too. You said Russ wants all this to go away. He’d listen to me. He couldn’t hurt me. He likes me.”

How do you talk people out of doing stupid shit? I thought about Hank, and felt guilty. “Listen, you may _think_ you can talk him around, but if you’re wrong, it’ll be your last mistake. You’ve got a kid to take care of. You need to stay out of this, OK?”

She pressed her lips together and looked back at Owen.

Russ was still pacing around with his phone. “Fine. We’ll meet you there.”

He shoved the phone into his pocket and snapped to Ace and Mossy, “We’re meeting Ernie at the jail.”

Ace walked back over and hauled Donnie up by one arm. “You want me to take the shrimp in the black car, or mine?”

“Take yours, I’ll have the boys take care of the Charger tomorrow.”

Like hell he would. I passed Liz’s keys to Tara, careful not to let them jingle. “Get out of here, _now_. If I’m not back at the car fifteen minutes after you get there, leave. Go back to the hotel. You hear me?”

She nodded reluctantly, eyes still on Owen. I scooted over behind a couple of cars, stood up, and walked toward the group.

Mossy was the first to see me. He’d just dragged Owen up to his feet, and happened to glance my way. “Russ!”

Ace turned around, halfway to the 4Runner, and dropped Donnie’s arm to put a hand on his holster. Just a reflex, I said to myself. Just a threat. I kept my eyes on Russ and kept walking.

“Evening, Russ,” I said, as pleasantly as he’d greeted me at the lodge.

“Cade,” he said, sounding a touch strained. “Surprised to see you here.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry I didn’t call ahead.” I kept walking until I was right up to him, with Donnie and Ace off to my left, Mossy and Owen to my right. “But it came to me all of a sudden that I can give you what you want.”

He was staring at the rectangular shape under my arm, and his eyes traveled up to see if I was serious. I took it with my other hand and held it out to him.

“This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Take it.”

He held his hand out, and I put the laptop in it. He took a step back, glanced at me, and took another step back before he flipped it over to look at the bottom.

“So you want Donnie,” he said.

“Donnie and Owen.”

He sent a sharp look my way. “You said you’d given up on Owen.”

“You said you wanted all of this to go away,” I countered. “There’s one more solution to this problem that you and I haven’t talked about.”

“And what’s that?”

“How about if I kill Owen for you?”

That sure got everyone’s attention.

Russ’s poker face wasn’t as good as Hank’s. He blinked a few times. “And that will solve this situation?”

I could see Donnie out of the corner of my eye, and I saw when he slowly shifted his right shoulder, the same flavor of _ignore-this_ as his casual half-step back when shit was about to go down.

“It absolutely will,” I said. “That does everything you want. You won’t have to worry about Owen talking for sure, but more than that, you’ll know I won’t talk. And it means none of your family has to be involved. You can say you have no idea what happened to him, and it’ll be the truth.”

He gave me a long look. I didn’t like being in the laser focus. I’ve never been a good liar.

“You said you could get me Tara…but you couldn’t, could you?” he said slowly. “Is that why you’re here asking me for Owen?”

“You’re stalling,” I said. “You aren’t sure what to do, so you’re stalling. Look, you don’t need Ernie making decisions for you. How long have you been running this dealership? You’ve got the laptop back, which is the one thing you’ve wanted this whole time. The rest of it’s easy. Step one, Ace hands me my car keys. Step two, he turns Donnie loose. Step three, Donnie and I put Owen in my car, and we leave.” And we’d meet Tara at Liz’s car. It would work.

“You don’t strike me as a cold-blooded killer,” he said.

“I’m not. But I’ll make an exception for him.”

“Why should I believe that?”

Ace was watching us, coiled to strike, but waiting on Russ’s signal. Next to him, Donnie had an unfocused look that meant he was concentrating on something else entirely. I had to give him time.

“You said you knew a little about what happened in North Carolina. Did Ernie get a copy of the report?”

Russ nodded, eyes narrowed, calculating.

“You’re Tennessee born and bred, Russ. You know how this works. I want him to hurt as much as I did. He kicked the shit out of me for _nine fucking hours,_ in between telling me how he was going to shoot me and dump my body off a mountain. Fair is fair.”

I half-expected Owen to cuss me out like he had the hunters who caught him, but his eyes were locked on the ground. He looked hollow and exhausted, like he didn’t expect to see sunrise and was just waiting for the end.

It was his fault I knew what that looked like. What it felt like. They say the best lie is one with a lot of truth in it. I went with what I had.

Russ’s eyes flicked over to Donnie. “Is your friend going to be OK with that plan?”

“Donnie’s as close to me as you are to Ernie.”

I could see wheels turning in his head. He wasn’t sure how much I knew, how much Owen had told me. He glanced down at where my holster wasn’t, rested his hand on the 1911 at his hip, and said, “If I handed you this, would you take care of him right now?”

“No, I wouldn’t. Because neither of us wants that. You don’t want to be a witness, much less an accessory. And I can see two restaurants from here with cars in the parking lot. Somebody over there hears a gunshot, they’re going to call the cops.” I took a step toward him, crowding into his personal space. “Also…I’m not planning to make it quick.”

Russ shook his head in disbelief. “You are one messed-up son of a bitch, aren’t you?”

“I am now. Thanks to him.”

I waited while he gave me another of those long, measuring looks. _Come on, Russ,_ I thought. I didn’t want to say anything else. I didn’t want to seem too eager, too crazy. Just crazy enough. It was the perfect solution for him.

“You’re asking me to trust you,” Russ said coolly, “and I’m pretty sure I don’t.”

Donnie’s shoulders dropped down as Ace’s elbow came up, and I thought _Aw, shit._

So I sucker-punched Russ.

I promise you, he was not expecting that. The laptop hit the ground, and he staggered back and groped for his holster as there was a really loud bang to my left. Something tagged my arm; I didn’t have time to think about that or Donnie; either he was dead or he wasn’t, and my job was to keep the asshole in front of me from drawing, so I charged forward, hit him a few more times, and slammed him down.

His head clunked off the pavement, so I dropped a knee on his wrist and reached for his holster. He wasn’t as dazed as I’d hoped. He snatched at my hand with his free hand as I pulled the 1911 out, and we both had hold of it for a second there. He tried to yank it away, but I crunched an elbow into his ribs and twisted his arm, and the gun went flying. I think he might have kicked me in the head somehow – shit was happening kind of fast – I fell back, and Russ scrambled in the direction the 1911 had gone.

Then he stopped, because it was pointed at him.

“You’d better stay there, Russ,” Tara said.

Nobody moved for a long, frozen moment. I glanced over at Donnie. No holes in him, thank God, and he had Ace locked down. I didn’t know where that gun had ended up, and Ace was spitting mad, but he wasn’t going anywhere unless he dislocated his own shoulder. I looked to see if I was about to get shot from the other direction, but Mossy was curled up whimpering on the pavement, trying to clutch at his face and his knee at the same time. Owen was standing over him, still in his cuffs. No time to figure out what the fuck.

The gun looked huge in Tara’s little hands. Russ tried for one of his patronizing smiles, and said, “Babydoll, do you have any idea how to use that?”

Only her thumb moved. _Click._

He didn’t seem to have anything to say to that. Carefully, I said, “Tara, I’m going to scoot back.”

“OK.” She didn’t take her eyes off Russ.

I slid back away from the two of them, and Donnie pointed me toward Ace’s gun, where it had landed by my car.

I picked it up and walked around so I was uprange of Tara. Nothing to criticize about her grip or her stance. Probably best to stay out of her way, I decided, though I couldn’t resist asking, “Didn’t you say you were going back to the car?”

“I said I heard you,” she said. The gun hadn’t wavered a bit.

To Russ, I said, “I don’t know about you, cowboy, but I think she looks pretty competent. Hon, I’m going to get some gear from the Charger. Feel free to shoot him if he moves.”

Donnie levered Ace sideways a bit, so I could grab my keys out of his pocket. Ace had a few choice words about that.

“You good here for a minute?” I asked Donnie.

“Yep, we’re just hanging out. Lordy, Ace, do you kiss your mama with that mouth?”

I popped the trunk of the Charger with my fingers crossed, hoping they hadn’t stolen my gear out of the back, but it was still there – and not just my gear, but also a canvas bag with my phone and my Glock, plus Donnie’s phone and his Smith & Wesson.

I grabbed some zip cuffs and started with Mossy. He had a lot of blood on his face, and his nose looked a little off-kilter. Owen had a satisfied, vindictive look as he stepped aside, though he kept a wary eye on me.

“How’d you manage that?” I asked.

“Popped him with my head and kicked him,” Owen said. “Guess where I learned that.”

“No idea. Kick this guy in the face if he tries to get up.” I went back over to Donnie and we got Ace secured too.

“Nice going, shrimp,” I said.

“Mantis shrimp, that’s me.”

“What?”

“Google it sometime.”

Donnie found his little handcuff key where it had fallen on the ground, and he traded it to Tara for the 1911. She trotted over to turn Owen loose. Once Donnie had the Wilson in hand, I had him go on overwatch while I threw my last pair of zip cuffs on Russ, who didn’t resist at all and seemed more stunned than anything else.

“You’ll never get anyone to believe you,” he said blankly.

“Most likely. Don’t go anywhere, OK?” I patted him on the shoulder and walked back to Donnie.

“I want you to remember that you owe me,” he said pointedly as I got close.

“Yeah, I know. You were right and I’m a dumbass.”

“You’re a dumbass who’s bleeding. You might want to see to that.”

Sure enough, my left sleeve was torn, with a damp red patch near my shoulder. I took my shirt half off so Donnie could take a look, and he said I must have barely caught that one round that went off. I had a quarter-inch divot on the outside of my arm, which looked pretty gross but was already clotting up. Donnie said he was sorry for knocking the gun toward me, and I told him to shut up, better my arm than his head.

“So what now?” he asked as I pulled my shirt back on.

“I guess we should call Irvine PD.”

“You’re not super excited about that.”

“We’ll be here until daylight trying to explain all this. It’s going to take forever.” The longer we were here, the more likely it was that Hank would hear about it. “I’d love to go all Scooby Doo on these guys, leave them tied up in a pile and call in an anonymous tip about stolen cars here. You’d probably like to get Ace nailed for assault, though.”

“Not necessarily.” He looked thoughtful.

That’s when my burner phone blew up with texts from Richard.

 _Scanner traffic  
Gunshot reported  
Cops heading ur way  
Tell me if ur OK  
_  
Shit. “We’re about to have company,” I told Donnie, and sent back, _Copy that, OK but busy_.

_Two cars responding_

“Richard says two cars. They’ll want to stop to link up before they get here. Listen.” I ran an idea by him.

“That could work,” Donnie said. “But how do we explain Owen and Tara?”

“I’ll think of something, you go ahead and call.”

He started calling 911 while I ran back to the Charger to grab the canvas bag. My mind was whizzing through scenarios and how to play this. “Owen! Get over here.”

He looked suspicious, but came over to me.

“Get in,” I said.

“What?”

“ _Get in_.” I pointed at the trunk. “Irvine PD is headed this way. We can probably hang on to Tara, but if the cops see you, they’re going to have questions.”

“But—”

“Do I need to punch you in the face to get you into the trunk of this car?”

He gave me a hard look, but he had to know I was right; the cops would be real interested in a guy with as many bruises and tattoos as he had. He cussed and dived in, and I slammed the trunk lid closed.

I may have had a bit of a spring in my step as I walked back over to Donnie and Tara.

“Yes, ma’am,” he was saying to the phone, “Two of us on scene. It’s not a hot situation now, but we could certainly use the help.”

Tara wasn’t happy with me. “Cade, what—”

“I’m glad you showed up when you did,” I said. “That could have turned out really bad for all of us.” And I told her what I wanted to do, and why.

She stared at me for a moment, then nodded.

Donnie said, “Yes, ma’am, we’ll stay put till they get here. Thanks.” He tucked his phone back into a pocket.

“We good?” I asked.

“Think so. Is it me, or did you just talk Owen into jumping into your trunk?”

“Sure did.”

“You need to teach me that trick,” he said with a straight face. “I want to try it next time we bring in a skip.”

“That’ll confuse the hell out of Hank.”

“Isn’t Russ going to tattle on us? It’ll be tricky to explain to the cops why you’ve got a wanted felon in your trunk, if he spills the beans.”

“I’ve got an idea about that,” I said, and headed back to where Russ was sitting on the ground.

He’d pulled together a few shreds of his usual confidence. “You don’t seriously think you can sneak Owen out of here, do you?”

“Oh, I’m absolutely going to sneak him out of here, and you and your buddies aren’t going to say a word about it.”

“Is that so?”

I sat down on the ground across from him. “Your brother screwed up, you know. He said he’d handle everything, and he didn’t.

“Now, it’s your call where we go from here. If you keep quiet about Owen, the Irvine cops are only going to be dealing with your stolen cars. Or, if you really want to, you can tell the cops to check the Charger’s trunk, and I’ll have to stand around here for hours talking about assault and kidnapping.”

“You’ll report that anyway.”

“Not if I don’t have to. I’ve gone through all that reporting crap once, for North Carolina, and I’d rather not have to do it again. I’d be happy to just take Owen and scoot out of here.”

“Why?” Russ asked. “He’ll end up in jail whether you take him in, or the Irvine police do.”

“Like you said earlier, it’s personal. Besides, Tara wants Owen to have a little more time with the baby. I don’t have an active contract, so technically I can’t hang on to him. So we need to get him back to Memphis first, and then I can take him where he needs to go.”

Russ smiled thinly. “I might be just petty enough to prevent that.”

“It’s up to you,” I shrugged. “You really want to piss off Tara that much? She’ll probably sue you for child support.”

He let out a short bark of laughter.

I didn’t say anything.

“That’s ridiculous,” he said, but I heard a tiny waver of doubt.

“Is it?”

“She and Owen ran off months ago. There’s no way—”

“Interesting choice of denial there, buddy. I’ll tell you, the baby’s not even a month old yet. Still think it’s ridiculous?”

His forehead wrinkled as he did the math, and I don’t think he liked the answer he came up with.

Gotta say, it was a real treat, watching the confidence slide off his face. He looked past me to where Tara was talking to Donnie. She turned and scampered off toward the back of the lot.

“You can say something to the cops if you want,” I said. “I’ll have a lot of explaining to do, and Owen’ll leave here in the back of a cruiser. Hell, I might too, if things get to that point. But where’s _she_ going to wind up? Do you want her in a courtroom, telling her story?”

“She – I’ve got lawyers from the best—”

“Sure you do. But she won’t let you get away with a quiet settlement. It’ll be a public hearing. Who else is going to be in that courtroom with you? Your wife? Your parents? Are you ready for them to watch her testify? Plus however many ex-employees of yours want to back her up?”

The way the blood drained out of his face, I think that idea hit him harder than if I’d kicked him in the nuts. Which was a tempting thought, to be honest, but two cop cars were pulling into the parking lot behind me.

“She doesn’t want to go through all that, any more than I want to talk about being illegally detained in your family’s cabin. But it’s up to you.” I stood up and walked back to talk to the cops.

They were understandably curious about why, exactly, we had Russell Reaves handcuffed in the parking lot of his own dealership.

I politely explained that my car – this one right here, sir – had been stolen from Campbell Valley State Park this weekend. I showed them my ID and my state-issued investigator’s license.

“We’re used to tracking things down, see?” I said. “We found out it was here, and we came to get it. Screw-up on my part, really. We should have called y’all to begin with. But I was mad, and I thought it would be faster to just come take it back. We didn’t expect anyone to be here this late at night. We had words with them, there was a bit of a scuffle, and then Ugly over there pulled his gun.”

Donnie put in, “I’m not even sure if he meant to shoot. As soon as he pulled it, I moved to get it away from him.”

“Either way, we figured shit had gotten to the point we needed to call y’all,” I said.

The cops did a good job of not reacting, I have to say. Maybe Resting Cop Face is something they learn at the academy.

“You know, another thing I noticed,” I said. “The rest of the cars in this row have plates from all over. If they were in for repairs, you’d think they’d have hang tags. Are any of these in your recent theft reports?”

The first cop looked at the cars, looked at Russ sitting on the pavement, keyed his radio, and requested a shift supervisor “for civilian interaction.” I wouldn’t have wanted to put Russ’s name out over an unsecured channel either. Richard was probably going nuts, wondering what was happening.

I turned over Ace’s Glock and Russ’s Wilson to the second cop. “Did you draw on these guys?” he asked, eyeing my Glock in its holster. 

“No, sir.”

“The two of you cuffed all three of them without holding anyone at gunpoint?”

“Well, the weaselly guy there got his nose crunched in the scuffle, so he was out of the fight after that. Donnie took down Ugly, and Russ doesn’t seem to be much of a fighter.”

The cop nodded like that made sense to him, and asked me and Donnie to hang out until his sergeant came by. He pulled out a notepad and walked over to his partner, who was looking at license plate numbers and talking on his radio.

“Where’s Tara?” I asked Donnie under my breath.

“She said y’all got here in Liz’s car, and she had the key, so I sent her back there,” he said, just as quiet. “You know, you could have done the same with Owen.”

“Like I’m going to hand Liz’s keys to a known car thief.” 

“Fair point, I guess. How’d you know to come here, dude? Russ didn’t have a plan when he left the junkyard, he decided on the way.”

It took me a second to realize what he was saying. “Wait, you were _there_?”

“For a few hours, yeah. But the guy running the place got a phone call from the sheriff’s office, so Ace threw Owen and me into the cars and they booked it out of there,” he said, and then a black & white SUV pulled into the parking lot.

The shift supervisor was a guy with salt-and-pepper hair and a command presence that reminded me of Hank. His name badge said “Sutton.” I explained my version of events again while the second cop listened in and took notes. Probably checking to see if my story changed on the second telling. I said before, I’m not the best at lying, but nearly everything I told them was the truth. I just left out a few things.

“I see. And how did you get here?” the sergeant asked.

“My friend’s car is parked behind the copy shop over there. We expected this lot would be blocked off at night.”

He checked the Charger’s VIN against the insurance card I pulled out of my wallet. “Hang out here for a minute, if you would,” he said, handing the card back.

He walked over to Russ. I held my breath.

“Sir, that black car appears to belong to that gentleman. Can you tell me why it’s here?”

Russ looked at me.

He looked at the car.

When he answered, his voice was diamond-hard. “I am invoking my right to speak to an attorney before I answer any questions.”

Not too long after that, Sgt. Sutton made sure he had our contact information correct and said we were free to go.

“Oh, one other thing,” I said. “Mr. Reaves was holding a laptop computer before things got hairy. It bounced under the Grand Cherokee when he dropped it, so I don’t know if it even works now. You might want to hand it off to a forensic computer specialist, in case there’s any evidence on it.”

The sergeant said he’d take care of it, so Donnie and I hopped in the Charger and drove around to where I’d left Liz’s car. Tara was there, waiting nervously, as we pulled up.

“I got something for you,” I told her, and let Owen out of the trunk. He gave me another of those accusing looks as he climbed out, but then Tara was on him like a starfish.

He winced and said, “Careful, babe,” but his arms went around her, and he put his head down on hers for a good long minute while Donnie and I planned our next moves.

“Where’s Logan at?” Owen asked Tara.

“Down in Memphis. Cade’s girlfriend is taking care of him.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” I corrected. “She’s just a friend.”

“Alright, kids,” Donnie said, “Y’all hop in this car here. Cade’s car is the one that Ernie’s people will recognize. They’d be crazy to try anything now, but let’s be safe just in case.”

It was a good thought, but we made it back to where Richard was waiting, scooped him up, and took the fastest route out of Blakeley County without any problems.

~~~

Six people plus a baby made the hotel room seem a lot smaller. Tara wasn’t even all the way in the door before she was reaching to take her little one back. When she sat down on the bed with Logan in her arms, her face was wet with tears. It happens like that sometimes – it doesn’t hit you until later, when you have time to think about what could have happened. Owen sat down and carefully put his arm around her.

Donnie and Richard started packing up computer stuff. I would have helped, but Liz caught me in a tight hug and didn’t seem to want to let go. Not that I minded at all. Her hair smelled like her cabin, woodsy with a hint of smoke. Donnie raised his eyebrows at me, and I mouthed _No_ at him over Liz’s head. He mouthed back, _Right_ , with the most skeptical expression you could imagine, and went back to helping Richard.

“You OK there?” I asked her. 

She nodded against my chest and looked up at me. “Are you?”

“I’m OK,” I reassured her, “and Donnie’s OK, and I think it’s all going to work out. Reaves Dodge is going to need to hire a new service manager. Stolen cars will be the least of Russ’s problems when the cops figure out whose laptop that was.”

“No joke,” said Donnie. “Owen gave me the rundown on that on the way back here. Russ is going to have some tense conversations over the next few days. Of course, we might too. How the hell are we going to enlighten Hank about this little adventure?”

“Lord, I don’t know,” I said. “Tell him it was all my idea? I’ve been expecting to get fired, but you guys shouldn’t have to stand in that shitstorm.”

“Hey, we’re big boys too,” Richard said, tossing a coiled cable into his backpack. “We made our choices, same as you did.”

Choices. God, I’d made so many bad ones. So many idiot moves and wrong turns. It was sheer luck that somebody hadn’t died, that things had turned out as well as they had. Though to be fair...it wasn’t really luck. It was Donnie, and Richard, and Liz. If there was luck in the mix, it was mine, for having friends like them.

“Do we have to tell Hank?” I asked, half-joking.

Donnie snorted. “Well, you’ll have to explain how Owen ended up in custody. And why you look like you fought off an army of angry kittens.”

“You and I went hiking this weekend. We got lost. I fell in a briar patch.”

“And him?”

I looked over at the bed. Owen and Tara weren’t paying the slightest bit of attention to us. Truth was, he looked even worse than when I’d first seen him in Russ’s basement. The bruises had darkened up, and he still held his battered left hand tucked in close. But as I watched, he reached out his other hand and gently tickled the baby’s palm. The tiny fingers closed around his.

Goddammit.

“Come over here for a minute,” I said to Liz. I got all four of us huddled up by the spindly desk for a quiet conference. I had half of a stupid idea, but when I told them what I was thinking, none of them would talk me out of it. I thought the hardest part would be coming up with the cash to make it work, but Richard pulled a healthy money clip out of his front pocket and handed me about two-thirds of the contents.

“Jesus, do you always carry that much?” Donnie asked.

“Can’t be tracked, and I never have to worry that some waiter’s stealing my card number,” he shrugged.

“And you’re sure about this?” Liz asked me.

“Yeah.” It felt right, more right than anything had felt in months.

I told them to go wait for me outside, since I wouldn’t be long. Owen looked up as the door closed, glanced around, and tensed up as he realized it was just the three of us.

“That looks like you don’t want your friends to be able to testify about something,” he said warily. “If you want to kick the shit out of me, you should send Tara out too.” 

“Don’t be stupid,” I said. “If I was going to do that, I wouldn’t do it here.” I took what I’d borrowed from Richard and put it on the corner of the bed.

“What’s that?” he said suspiciously.

“That’s cash,” I said. “You use it to buy stuff. Like bus tickets.”

I’ve never seen anyone look so confused. I didn’t think it was all that hard to understand. “Look,” I said patiently, “right now, what I want most in the world is to get some sleep. I don’t want to deal with you. So I’m literally going to pay you to go somewhere else. I don’t care where. I just never want to see you again.”

He stared at the small stack of cash. “Are you fucking with me?”

“Donnie paid for this room for tonight. After that, you two get out of town. Deal?”

Tara’s eyes lit up as she realized I was serious. Donnie was going to be so mad he’d missed one of her knock-you-flat smiles.

Owen wasn’t quite there yet. “You have lost your damn mind.”

“That’s your fault,” I said. “You shouldn’t have hit me in the head so hard.”

His mouth hung open for a moment, then he closed it, started to say something, and stopped. Tara whispered something in his ear, and he looked over his shoulder at his backpack, sitting in the corner. Slowly, he stood up and went over to it, like he was afraid I’d change my mind if he moved too fast.

He worked the zipper open with one hand and rummaged around in the bottom of the pack. I thought maybe he had some other evidence on Russ he wanted me to pass along, something he’d been saving to bargain with. But what he pressed into my hand had nothing to do with Blakeley County.

Fuck me if it wasn’t my flashlight.

It was definitely mine, with the silver bits where the black coating had rubbed off over the years. I clicked it on and off; it still worked and everything. I tucked it next to my spare mag, where it settled in with a satisfying _click_.

“Deal,” Owen said.

The door closed behind me, and I headed across the parking lot to where Liz and Donnie and Richard were hanging out by our cars. I’d reached that stage of tiredness where you feel like your head isn’t quite tethered to the rest of you, but somehow I felt better than I had in ages. I made it over to them without tripping over my feet.

“Got that settled?” Donnie asked.

“Yep. Can we be done now? I’d really like to be done.”

“Same. Who wants to give me a ride home? Remember, I got chauffeured to Blakeley in a delivery van.”

I swear, he can joke about anything. “I’ve been meaning to ask you, how the hell did they manage to pick _you_ up?”

“Well, you got so much attention for getting kidnapped, I thought I’d give it a try.” I threw a backhand jab at him, and he caught it with a grin and pretended to elbow me in the ribs. “No, seriously, anyone can be ambushed. You know I’ve been trying to tell you that forever. I was headed for my car, I came out the door, and _bam_. They were waiting for me.”

“That is _wild_ ,” Richard said. “Are we really not going to tell Hank about this?”

“Well, he’s going to know _something_ happened,” Donnie said. “When Cade turns up with brand-new bruises and says he’s done looking for Owen...”

“I’ll tell him you took me out back and beat some sense into me,” I suggested.

“Can you say it convincingly enough? I can beat some sense into you now, if it would help,” he offered brightly.

“No thanks, I’ve hit my quota on ass-kicking for the week.”

“Serious question, love,” said Liz. “Can you drive yourself home without falling asleep at the wheel?”

“Uh...” I had to think about it.

“Don’t risk it,” Donnie said. “The dojo’s five minutes from here, and I’ve got a stack of foam mats. All of y’all could crash there, if you want. I’ve got tons of space.”

Richard said he’d pass, since his buddy Tony would need his car back by morning, but Liz considered it. “That does sound better than driving an hour in the dark.”

“Honestly, I’d feel better if you didn’t go back there tonight,” I said. “The sheriff’s still got your address.”

Donnie agreed. “You’ll be safe once things start shaking out, but give it a day or so. You can borrow my sleeping bag. On top of a couple of mats, that’ll be super-comfy. Cade, is your sleeping bag in your car?”

“Not in the car, it’s in a closet at home.”

Liz slipped her hand into mine. “It’s OK. There’s a blanket in my car he can use.”

**Author's Note:**

> TW/CW details:  
> \- Some suicidal ideation in chapters 1, 3, 8, and 10. It's just a line or two each time, not dwelt on at length, but it's there.  
> \- Mildly dubious consent in chapter 6, in a discussion of past events. The character says she consented; the reader may not agree with her. It's a power imbalance thing.  
> \- Swearing/profanity throughout - it's a culture of toughness, after all.


End file.
